in the middle of the fire

 

REFLECTION AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU 
and St Martin’s, Duntroon
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT

(December 18^th) 2022
 
 
 READINGS:
 
Differing readings in the two centres, so I am taking, loosely, as a text Daniel 3:25:

“But I see four men unbound, walking in the middle of the fire, and they are not hurt, and the fourth has the appearance of a god” 

(or T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland,” line 360, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”

 

I could spend a lifetime meditating on Advent and Christmas readings. So many to choose from. Were we strictly observing Advent 4 today we would be dwelling on the obedience, at great self-risk, of Joseph as he learns that his fiancée Mary is carrying a child that is not his.

Never mind that this child is the implantation of God in Mary’s womb, let us give Joseph his humanness: this child is not his, and Mary is his fiancée. By choosing to remain in relationship with her he is protecting her life; by choosing to obey God he is risking his dignity, his pride, his mana, his all.

It is risk itself that I find myself dwelling on at this time of the year. So many risks in the Incarnation of Christ. I don’t, to be honest, know what “Son” means in the context of God, but I do know that God’s very selfhood, God’s very essence is being placed into the terribly vulnerable state that is human existence. And yes, we have been trained to read the story of the conception, gestation and birth of Jesus as a safe and secure plan that was always going to work out, and after Christmas the reading of the slaughter of the innocents will strengthen that impression.

But what of the “yes, but” moments? Mary, aided by her fiancé, permits the entire plan of God to nestle in her womb, to nestle, to be born in what in another context Harry Chapin coyly calls “the usual way.” She lives, thouigh Joseph doesn’t, to eventually see him brutally executed. For we cannot divorce the birth and death of Jesus, and the roller coaster that is Mary’s life is one of terrifying ferocity. It is small wonder she ponders things in her heart along the journey. Of course we know the Easter story, and thank God we do. But she didn’t.

Still:  never can we neglect the resurrection. Stripped of that, then all that Mary faces, like so many women of hers and every age, is a story of a broken heart. So we will glance forward to the resurrection. But she could not, back in Bethlehem.

Later, when the first Christians turned to their scriptures, the Hebrew Scriptures, to make sense of all that had taken place in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, they turned amongst many scriptures to the story of Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. They turned to a fourth figure walking in the flames with those who Nebuchadnezzar was trying to execute. They saw in that story a metaphor to unlock the meaning of Christmas. God entering the risk of human existence, God with us, Emmanuel in the flames of human existence, the womb of human existence. The fourth always with us watching not from a distance, not far off, but actually one of us.

The song by Joan Osborne, “One of Us,” so big a hit in the 1990s, is frustratingly ambivalent: does it capture or entirely miss the story that dwells at the heart of Christian faith? If you know the song, I’ll leave the question with you. If you don’t, ignore it. But in the womb God becomes one of us. Eternally.

T. S. Eliot famously captured the image another way – allegedly reflecting on the legends surrounding Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions. The party of explorers constantly had a sense of an extra presence with them as they faced the very extremities of human vulnerability. “Who is the third who walks always beside you” the poet asks an unseen, unnamed companion. The poet is there, the companion is there, but a shadowy figure, too is there, a presence bringing what may be divine hope into every human existence. An extra, almost seen presence. Who is the third in the poet’s conversation? Who is the fourth in the furnace? Whose are the footprints in the sand? The metaphors, of various merit, capture the Incarnation. Diana Spencer used the image of a third party in a marriage in a rightly dark and menacing way, but the figure of the Book of Daniel and of “The Wasteland,” while dark, is not menacing.

From the moment of conception in the uterus of Mary, God is one of us. God in Christ – not a distant God staring from afar – but God within the very vulnerabilities and risks and successes and failure of being human, is one of us. God, passing through the birth canal. God in a manger. God at the mercy of humans. God breathing resurrection into every death. God in the furnace of life and death. God dependent on Mary saying “Yes,” on Joseph saying “Yes,” and, strangely, on each of us saying “Yes,” as we ask God to be, as Wesley puts it, “born in us today.” Today and every today of our lives.

“There is always another one walking beside you,” says Eliot. Amen, say the scriptures.

 

 

 

divine size 14 boot

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU 
and St Alban’s, Kurow
THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT
(December 11^th) 2022
 
 
 READINGS:
 
Isaiah 35: 1-10
For psalm: Luke 1: 47-55
James 5: 7-10
Matthew 11: 2-11

 

As I interacted with my gospel conversation co-conversationalists the other day it occurred to me that one of the foremost and most neglected themes to emerge from this week’s gospel reading is the invitation established by John the Baptist to interrogate Jesus.

Often in my career I have tended to hang loose to the gospel readings, dipping more completely into the other readings and seeking application for our own times in those encounters with the God we serve. Occasionally I’ve been organised enough to weave through the readings, letting them cast light on each other – interrogate each other as I have just put it. That in fact is how the lectionary is designed, but whether we use what is called the “continuous readings,” something of a misnomer in any case, or the so-called “related readings,” the links are often tortured at best. Nevertheless our readings do in a sense interrogate each other. Isaiah’s ecstatic vision of joy asks our God – who as Christians we believe is definitively revealed in Jesus Christ as found in the gospels – asks our God where we might find joy in a tormented world, whether then in the first century – or today in our twenty-first.

“Here is your God … he will come” says Isaiah, foreshadowing that powerful word Immanuel, God with us. But where? Where is Isaiah’s God in the midst of the semi-apocalyptic doom and gloom of our era? Isaiah’s vision is of a God with a big stick who will bash up the Putins and Taliban and torturers and exploiters of his time. 

Is that our God? Such a God seems remarkably absent in our world, or at a more micro level, in the terrifying worlds of victims of war, famine or abuse. I will tend to explore answers, if such can be proposed to that question more in the context of Good Friday when we find God on a Cross crying out in resurrection solidarity with all who have cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is an eternal question. But let us for now acknowledge that the affirmation of either Isaiah or Jesus that there is hope, that God will come, that God will be with us, that God is with us, these can seem a pretty tenuous claim after 2000 years or more. Perhaps as philosophers like Nietzsche or Sartre and the fiercely evangelical New Atheists have claimed, God is simply dead or absconded.

Hopefully it is needless for me to add that this dark view is not mine. If it were I might well be mowing my lawns right now. But I’m not, long though they are after two weeks’ absence.

Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist – under threat of death – is understandably impatient too. It is sobering to note that he does not really see an answer to his question before he dies a brutal death. Interrogating Jesus, even believing in Jesus, is not necessarily innocuolation against dark times.

Where then is hope in the crazy Jesus-story? Jesus’ own answer is simply “go, see,” and we may well be human enough not to find that entirely convincing.

We have to be realistic. There is so much in our Christian story which is hardly Christ-convincement. We have seen exploitation, self-aggrandisement, grim stories of abuse perpetrated by those who claim the name of Christ, and suffering even to the extent of John the Baptist experienced by those who follow Christ. Where, then, is good news breaking through the white noise of calamity?

We might note  that Jesus warned that there would always be tares – thistles we might say – amongst the fine wheat of faith. That amongst those claiming the name of Jesus there would be wolves in sheep’s clothing, predators amongst the pure of heart. He also warns of times of great trial for his followers – John the Baptist at the very least foreshadows the trials that those who are obedient to God may face. I make no secret of my own belief that ours is a time of sifting, sorting the thistles from the wheat grass, or whatever metaphor we might choose. The brutal exposure of our institutional church by royal commissions, by collapsing kudos and resources, by marginalisation in society’s consciousness: these are amongst the trials predicted by Jesus, and they have always been a part of the Christian story. Jesus speaks of them when he prays that we may not be led into times of trial.

Yet we find ourselves at least to some degree in a time of trial. And there will be greater trials yet as our false gods are torn from us. Parishes collapse, church buildings crumble, close, or both, and numbers dwindle to nothingness. Those in what Jesus tellingly calls “soft robes” and ostentatious palaces are receiving the firm Size 14 boot of God’s winnowing Spirit. Our children and grandchildren, most of us, care little for our esoteric beliefs about an invisible friend.

Yet we can even without, no: especially without ostentatious palaces and soft robes – he says while admittedly wearing the beautiful robes of liturgy – be the sign for which John the Baptist was looking, for which John the Baptist asked Jesus. Are we able, in whatever small way, able to touch lives, to shine light, if only faintly, to penetrate a whole lot of grey dark?

It’s been kind of nice for me this past fortnight to return to old haunts across the ditch, and, returning, not to know but at least to wonder if God has maybe just once or twice or more, pray God, used this stumbling Christ-follower to touch a life or two, to murmur the rumour that love, hope, justice, joy, peace can still exist in some small but God-breathed way even in our century.

And, as John the Baptist interrogates Jesus, perhaps we can too, and can offer our lives as we do in the liturgy, to in some small way be a living sacrifice, be a vehicle through which God may touch and encourage those we walk amongst. Our task, in the words of the famous prayer of Richard of Chichester, is simply to know him more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly, day by day, by continued exposure to the experiences of those around us, by immersion in the stories of scripture, and in the rhythms of liturgy. May God help us so to do.

fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

KO TE KARAITI TE KINGI - CHRIST THE KING  

(November 20^th) 2022

Near Eucla, January 1998

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 23: 1-6

For psalm: Luke 1: 68-79

Colossians 1: 11-20

Luke 23: 33-43

 

 

There is a strange sense in the lectionary that introduces periods of incremental change in the themes of the readings that we journey through. It is as if we were meant to prepare ourselves gently for the larger changes around the corner.

As it happens, if you will excuse a digression for a moment, there's a couple of places in the geography of Australia where you drive through unofficial time zones that create a segue from one time zone to another. If you drive from Adelaide West to Perth you don't make the full 2½ hour time change at the border but drive through an unofficial region about 80 or 100 kilometres long around the minute settlement of Eucla, where your time is changed by three quarters of an hour. In reality it makes considerable business sense, as is even more apparent in the New South Wales town of Broken Hill which on the basis of population gravity locates itself in South Australian time. These are important subtleties when you pick up a phone or e-mail your nearest business contact who may legally share your time zone, but who in reality isn't out of bed yet. Of course if you're driving the reasonably significant distances across our big flat red western neighbour it doesn't matter quite so much.

So yeah, we are in a sort of transition zone here. We have leapt from Jesus journeying towards Jerusalem to not only his arrival there, but, omitting a few details about meals, arrests and torment, have leapt to his crucifixion. We saw the full process, of course, months ago in Holy Week, but now we are approaching the death of Jesus wearing a different pair of glasses. Surrounded by political upheaval in the world we are looking for leadership that is greater than, sounder than, more just and compassionate than, the dictatorships of a Putin or a Muhammed bin Salmin, or the chaotic narcissistic machinations of a leader-in-waiting of that powerful nation between Mexico and Canada.

So how is this shift in the church calendar, originally invented by Pope Pius XI, supposed to rumour good news? To answer that question we need to know that Pius in 1925 was doing all he could to counter the emerging tyranny of an Adolf Hitler, a Benito Mussolini, a Joseph Stalin, or, though he was still a year from infamy, a Francisco Franco. Pius XI was a brave and visionary man, who openly accused the Nazi government of sowing “fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church,” the same accusation we might make of Vladimir Putin, despite his snuggly relationship with leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. They must themselves stand alongside Putin before the stern judgement of God on the day of reckoning.

We know of course that they have always been tyrants, that the more things change the more they stay the same. It is often hard to proclaim a God of hope when tyrants prevail. Yet that is an eternal problem and in our Jewish and Christian heritage it reaches back at least to the beginnings of scripture. As it happens the story of Cain and Abel was a reasonably late Hebrew scripture, but it makes clear that there always will be as there always has been tyrants soaked in blood. Against all common sense we are called to believe that nevertheless God’s final word is one of light, not darkness, is “Yes” not “No.”

The kingship that we acknowledge and celebrate on this day is revealed as a polar opposite to the kingship that the tyrants of history have sought to establish. God is not a king of missiles, but as revealed in Christ is the King of Love. The hymn writer Henry Williams Baker put it beautifully when he interpreted Psalm 23: “the king of love my shepherd is.” The kingship revealed in Jesus Christ is compassion, love, justice, and it is of these graces that we are called to be bearers.

If we were to hold the entire church year together in our thoughts we would recognise the recurring theme that we can only be ambassadors of this king of love by opening again and again our hearts, minds, spirits to his redeeming, sustaining, edifying and transforming love. It is to that surrender to this king of love that we called day by day, Sunday by Sunday, and it is for that reason that it is such a fine and soaring note on which to end the church year.


My sermons will be conspicuuous by their absence for the next couple of weeks, as I swan around in the southern reaches of that vast flat western isle, acquainting myself with a few grandchildren / mokopuna born since Covid, and reaquainting myself with a few born before. Oh and a few daughters, too. And their partners. Bring it on!

light at dark tunnels' end

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

THIRTY-THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (November 13^th) 2022

 

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Isaiah 65:17-25

For psalm: Isaiah 12

2 Thessalonians 3: 6-13

Luke 21: 5-19

 

 

 

If you’ve been even loosely noticing the way in which Luke has constructed his version of the Jesus-story you will be well aware by now that much of the story revolves around a very intentional journey towards Jerusalem. While our Muslim friends have an equivalent in, for example the Hajj and its destination in Mecca, both as Christian people and as kiwis we have little of equivalence. Neither in term of national identity nor in the relationship between faith and place our religion do we have equivalent. Perhaps as we grow in our recognition of cross-cultural stories the centrality of Waitangi will develop a similar resonance – and for some the even more demanding pilgrimage to Anzac Cove, Anzac Koyu, has similar dimensions. But on the whole, yeah, nah. And for those of us of faith the location of God within in us has gazumped any particularly deep sense of a spirit of place, though we do I think mourn in our Anglican tradition if our places of worship are desecrated or deconsecrated.

But for Luke’s audience and indeed for Jesus the importance of Jerusalem was immeasurable. Jesus has reached the holy city a couple of passages back, we have seen him weep over the city; in Matthew’s gospel account particularly we will hear Jesus make warning about the “desolating sacrilege” first referred to in Daniel and much loved by the crystal-ball gazing scripture-twisters who fill the stages and hog the microphones of sensationalist churches. For us it is important to remember that when Jesus spoke the Second Jewish Temple was still intact, a wonder and a central element of both faith and national identity. By the time Luke recorded his words pretty much all that remained was destruction, the rubble of past glory and past hope. The safest of safe spaces, the happiest of happy-spaces was gone. I can think of few equivalents.

Yet, Luke notes, Jesus speaks words of hope in the midst of immeasurable darkness. Again there are few comparisons in our story. For indigenous peoples, including Māori, I think there is a realization that what social historians tend to call “contact” was, however inevitable, a watershed, a cataclysm that wrought irreversible change to the world of their ancestors, their tupuna. For the newer nations such as New Zealand in all its bi- and multi-cultural history there is so far no such moment. There have though been wars of horror and natural calamities, and of course for all of us there have been personal calamities, after which life could never be the same again. And in the midst of these Luke reminds us that Jesus spoke – and still speaks we might add – a contradictory word of hope. Stand tall, he says. Like the prophets before him he dares to speak of a different narrative: be not afraid. I am with you, says God, even to the ends of ages.

Not easy, of course, to believe. And part of Jesus’ command to stand tall is the command to continue to be active. We are not called to despair, for example, in the dance of global warming and possible global extinction (including our own extinction) but to be active in attempts to midwife a better future. Christians who snidely await the destruction of the earth in the expectation that they will be slickly whisked away to a better place are not standing in the footsteps of Jesus. We are called to be active and hope-filled to the last, and to be aided in that by the presence of God with us. And sometimes we will stumble. And the invisible Spirit will prod and nudge, if we let her, and the journey to our own New Jerusalem will go on. God meets us in our anxiety, and leads us on.

It's not magic. We need to do our part. To cling to the hopes that are made known to us in scripture. Indeed, as our bishop reminds us over and again, to pray, to read the bible, to be – using my own words – as Christ to those around us. We are called – with the help of God – to exercise intentional, spirit-filled love, justice and compassion. And we almost certainly will not see the real impact of our moments and our days, my well see, perhaps should see the closure of the temples of our faith and happy spaces of our lives, but that, says Jesus, that recorded Luke, is not the end of God’s great story.

Harp free zone

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

THIRTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (November 6^th) 2022

 

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Haggai 1:15b – 2:9

Psalm 98

2 Thessalonians 2: 1-5, 13-17

Luke 20: 27-38

 

On a couple of occasions I have had cause to mention that the bad press given to the Pharisees in the New Testament is not altogether fair. On the whole, I have suggested, the Pharisees were more akin to contemporary clergy in the mainstream churches, and for that matter synagogues, even mosques: they were people who believed in their God, and did their best to exercise compassion and love and to proclaim justice and hope in a world that seemed to lack an awful lot of those ingredients. A world that seemed to lack an awful lot of those ingredients but was by and large not going to look for them in the corridors of organized religion. Later, as the embryonic Christian community began to fall out with its Jewish neighbours, things turned a little toxic and the Pharisees began to get bad press. Bad press in some ways, I have suggested, that was similar to the ways in which professional religious representatives have been given bad press, on the basis of some very bad eggs amongst their colleagues who have rightly been exposed by investigations and commissions. We hope of course, or I hope we hope that clergy will learn from mistakes of the past, and that whatever emerges from the collapse of our institution will indeed proclaim love, justice, compassion, and resurrection hope.

But there appears to be little in the way of mitigating circumstances when it comes to the behaviour of the Sadducees. They ceased to be a problem by the time the New Testament was written. They were so deeply in bed with the corrupt Roman Empire that, following the destruction of the Second Temple, they simply melted away into their well-feathered if somewhat lonely nests. They were, incidentally, providers of the detestable work force of tax-collectors, exploiting the underlings amongst their own people, making their own wallets fat by means of any method available, and making all the more remarkable the fact that Jesus on at least two occasions invites one of them to join his rag-taggle scrum of followers – one named Zacchaeus, another named Matthew.

Their main failing as proclaimers of God was not so much their denial of resurrection – but their exploitation of the vulnerable. There are theologians today – I think of the redoubtable Lloyd Geering and the, in my opinion, less credible Jack Spong, who specialize in disproving, to their view, any personal hope-after-death narratives. I think they are wrong, and may be in for a pleasant surprise in whatever eternity turns out to be, but I do not think they are evil in the way predatory and/or parasitic clergy have been throughout history. Those who feather their nests with fleets of Harley Davidsons and hangars-full of Bombadiers, those who avoid taxes by claiming miniscule wages while living in palatial homes, those who destroy children by preying on them: those are with the Sadducees amongst the lowest levels of humanity. But again: let us not forget that Jesus’ love reached even to the tax-collectors Matthew and Zacchaeus, and awaited only their surrender.

That too is not to say that denial of resurrection hope is poor taste. I often find it hard to believe my six impossible things of faith, things like resurrection and eternal existence, before breakfast. But there are times we are called to suspend our disbelief. I happen to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, and in the hope of the New Heavens and Earth and Humanity and of you and me and those we love and lose, impossible though it sems to me. But even on dark days I would be sub-human to declare, for example, at the funeral of a still-born child that the only hope of reunion was some sort of rebirth in the nitrogen cycles of a dying planet. Not so. And Jesus did not mean that, either, when he said there would neither be marrying or giving in marriage n the hereafter that he called eternal life.

The Sadducees also represented the worst of religiosity in another way. Dipping often ill-gotten wealth, they ensured, like powerful slave-owners, that those under their spell had no hope of escape. Like drug lords, paedophiles, televangelists, domestic abusers and other models of corruption, even like some oppressive mainstream clergy of days I hope gone by, they kept their minions in place, kept their dependents dependent, kept the light of dawn from breaking. The Sadducees’ story of the woman owned by seven brothers is the story of a society in which women were property, alongside shares in Twitter and the spare house in the Caribbean. Yet ever the tragedy of her purported life was, arguably, marginally better than that of the women, then and now, left to die when society has no further use for them.

But let’s finally come to Jesus, as every sermon should. For it is into this world of darkness – which was ever thus – that Jesus came. Jesus came, and Jesus spoke, and there was in Jesus, as I’ve said before, no credibility gap between his word and his action. Jesus speaks of a God whose love and hope reaches beyond the darkest darkness – beyond Good Friday when hope dies – and into the brightest of benevolent light. He speaks of a love that transcends even the most mind- and body- and soul- blowing experiences of human love, some of which are, we know, pretty good.  When he speaks of “those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage” he is speaking not of a negative, not of some chaste and dull state sitting on a cloud playing a harp, but of all we can imagine that is life-enriching. That and immeasurably much more.

As I’ve mentioned (often) elsewhere, the author of the Book of Revelation speaks of that which is to come not as static tedium but of electrifying engagement and action: the very best of all we’ve known and so much more. Jesus speaks of the God “who will shake all the nations” – who is doing a pretty good job of that right now – and yet even, after the last fading shake of human and cosmic history, will be God of the living beyond our sight. Beyond our sight, that is, for now, until we too join the saints who see no longer through a darkened glass, until we join our forebears and say at last, “aha, so that’s how it is.”

And the Sadducees may be in for a surprise. For good or ill will be their choice. Though whether there can be ill in the patient and eternal heart of God is a question for another time.

 

 

are we there yet?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

THIRTIETH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (October 23^rd) 2022

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Joel 2: 23-32

Psalm 65

2 Timothy 4: 6-8, 16-18

Luke 18: 9-14

 

 

As we scamper through the readings it would be negligent not to mention and grasp the wonderful hope-filled prophesy of Joel, who almost swims against the tide of the prophets. He dares to whisper the hope of a God who will love again, affirm again, set right again the recalcitrant people God had called to be his own.

In a world that is churning out an awful lot of darkness that might resemble the wrath of a grumpy God, handing humankind over to its own rather misguided devices, it’s encouraging to hear Joel’s words of hope. In Dante’s portrayal of Hell the words “abandon hope all ye who enter here” are emblazoned above the entrance. Joel reminds us that ours is a gospel of hope, not just in the cruisy times that we have enjoyed for much of our lives but in the heart-pulling times that have also always been a part of the human story.

Am I the only person who sometimes feels like giving up? 

Or, as Maria McKee put it, “God help me, am I the only one who ever felt this way?” And the answer is “no,” I'm not the only one.

And “yes,” God helps. 

I want to park Joel’s words of hope for a while, though. Because in the Jesus story we have what appears at first sight to be a clear contrast given to us by Luke, as Jesus observes and reflects on a spiritually arrogant Pharisee and a broken, guilt-ridden but penitent tax collector. It is a contrast between a religious hypocrite, perhaps, and a penitent sinner. In our minds we might picture the sequel to this vignette. Jesus welcomes the penitent to the fellowship of faith, while the Pharisee saunters away, ever so pleased with himself.

Where are we in this story? We have to be careful. Unless we wrongly believe the scriptures to have been dictated from on high into a Word document, perfect in every syllable, then we have a problem here. The Pharisees get bad press in the four gospel stories, but they were written some time after the events they depict. History suggests that the Pharisees were not all bad. Not even mostly bad. By the time the gospels were written Jews and Christians were trapped in mutual distrust – we might think of the distrust clergy are held in by much of society today, a distrust that grows deeper with every chilling revelation that emanates from Royal Commissions and their equivalent around the world.

Don’t get me wrong. Awful atrocities have been perpetrated by those in positions of power in Christian communities. So too have works of grace and love. We must remember that, just as there are Christians who hold the hands of the dying and whisper words of comfort in every age, so too the Pharisees were on the whole compassionate, God-serving believers. If you want to look for the bad guys of Jesus’ decade you might want to look at the Sadducees. They were the ones riding Harley Davidsons and flying Bombadiers or Gulfstreams in the name of corrupt, life-sapping religion.

It is particularly important that we remember this, because our Christian history has, with tragic implications, tended to write a false equation when we have said simply “Jews were and are corrupt,” and “aren’t we Christians good?” We forget the Jewishness of Jesus at great peril. We forget our own histories of distorted faith at great peril. Yet to say that, too, is not to invite slippage into the error of those Christians who believe the State of Israel can do no wrong,. We do not stand with those who danced on the graves of justice, moving at least on paper their embassies to Jerusalem. Such figures flew in the face of decency by trampling down the delicate sensitivities of all who find holiness in that troubled spot on earth, and did so to please a self-righteous religious right.

No political state should be confused with the people of God. Not Israel, not the USA, not Syria, not Burkina Faso. God disregards the lines we draw on maps. God regards the Image of God, bestowed on humans in creation, and marred each time we perpetrate hatred and injustice. 

And, fierce Anglican though I am, God disregards the subtle differences in the way we worship or the ways we protect the structures of our faith-based institutions. God, loathe though I am to admit it, is neither Israeli nor Anglican. God looks for integrity, high or low, left or right.

It is tempting to read this Jesus-scene and to judge and condemn the Pharisee. I am reminded again and again, and will be until I die, of the ecclesiastical gatekeeper who in a previous parish told a newcomer that they had come to the wrong place. Was it the colour of her skin, her tattoos, her youth, that made him decide she was not welcome? Did that gate-keeper later pray “thank God we do not let those people in here”?

Yet this Jesus-scene throws a still fiercer issue at me: are there times I do precisely that? Do we by our traditions turn away the too young, the too uneducated, the too non-European from our fellowship?

Am I the broken tax-collector or the Pharisee?

At best I suspect the answer is both. And surely our life-task is to ensure that all that is holier-than-thou, all that leads us to look down on others, is stripped from us, and that we become safe people who know our own need for divine grace, and simultaneously see the hand of God on the lives of all around us.

Perhaps it’s a long bow, but was that was what the prophet Joel was looking towards, too. To a time when his people would be a people of welcome and embrace, of justice and love, whose sign above the door written in actions not words, was “experience hope (and love, and welcome …) all ye who enter here.” Are we there yet?

steadfast love ... despite all

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

TWENTY SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (October 2^nd) 2022

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Lamentation 1: 1-6

Psalm 137

2 Timothy 1: 1-14

Luke 17: 5-10

 

As Luke approaches the end of Jesus’ resolute journey to Jerusalem and inevitable execution, he knits together a pot pourri of parables and other Jesus sayings whose connexion is not always clear to us 2000 years later. Between last week, when Anne was here, and this week, we skip some telling sentences that may just have some words of warning to our present world. Let’s dwell with them for a moment.

The missing sentences are about causing others to sin, and about forgiveness. Perhaps they're considered too hot to handle in the cosy world in which the lectionary was drawn up for 2022. But times have changed to such an extent that it is even harder to pretend that ours is a cruisy and cosy existence. For since February when President Putin put into action his demonic brain explosion we have found it even harder than before to live with our heads in the sand. That said, when we hear tell of Putin’s sending still more able bodied men to face and inflict terror and destruction in the east of Ukraine It may be worth remembering the Jesus saying that we were supposed to admit, a troubling saying that tells us that where we have caused sin, caused people to sin, judgement awaits around unexpected corners.

And in our cosy corner of the world it is easy to consider that this has no application to us. We are neither being sent nor sending others to a military frontline to inflict and experience devastation. But it is worth pausing for a moment. Not for the first, nor for the last time in our lifetimes we are hearing of the atrocities that we call war crimes. The perpetrators of such evil must not be allowed to escape judgement, human or of course we dare to believe, divine.

The Nuremberg trials taught us that simple compliance with evil is no excuse for upping the ante and carrying out evil orders. God alone knows how we would respond if we were inflamed by racial and nationalistic hatreds, but that's not the issue. The issue is that any who have perpetrated evil must face judgement, human or divine, human and divine. Wars since Nuremberg have taught us again and again the humans are capable of perpetrating atrocities beyond belief, and there can and must be no excuse for such sub-animal behaviour. But greater still is the judgement that rests on the shoulders of those whose ego and nationalistic pride sends others to carry out their dirty work. Racial hatred and jealousies are no excuse for perpetrating evil. But even since Nuremberg there has been reminder after reminder of the evil that can dwell in human souls. War crimes committed by Germans, Japanese, and perhaps we thought that was the end of the list, but since then by Rwandans, Serbians, and let us not forget British and American military, and now Russian soldiers and mercenaries, these reinforce the message that all human beings are capable of evil given the chance and the motivation. No claim that the devil made me do it, or my senior officers made me do it, or circumstances made it inevitable, will ever be an excuse in the eyes of divine or even credible human courts.

So much then for the Jesus sayings that were to be omitted this week. Perhaps it is some comfort that the primary perpetrators of evil, the likes of Pol Phot, Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić and now Vladimir Putin, face a judge more stern even than those of war tribunals, but the thought is for now small comfort to the widowed, the injured, or the dead of Ukraine.

Yet these are big pictures beyond our comprehension, and far away from us. The Jesus sayings in this section of Luke shift focus from judgement to forgiveness – the latter an inconceivably difficult concept in the face of such atrocity – and on to faith and duty. In the light of current international events these themes may after all be close to being too hot to handle. We are not qualified to speak of forgiveness and we may well be misconstrued if we speak of duty in a time of all too real military engagement (not we should add that there has never been in our lives a time without military engagement).

So where do these reflections leave us? We are on the whole unlikely to face the cataclysms being faced in Eastern Europe. This is one of those times when not individual passages but the whole sweep of scripture must be the key to facing God’s future. As it happens our reading from Lamentations reminds us that desolation and despair can all too readily fall on those who consider themselves to be the chosen of God, and may even be considered to be a tool of God’s wrath. To say this is to speak en masse, to speak collectively. God is not punishing the individuals on whom Putin’s obscene missiles fall any more than God is punishing the Hector’s dolphins swimming in their last desperate circles off the coasts of our country. In the beginning of the book we call Romans Paul makes it clear that God can hand us over to the implications of our existence and like the Three Musketeers we can find ourselves all for one and one for all. All have sinned, and to a large extent all wallow in the outcomes of human sin.

So where is there good news for us? I guess I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't believe it was there. The writers of scripture offer us no “beam me up Scotty” escape routes from the results of human sin. The witness of scripture however whispers something else. It whispers of the healing, redeeming hand of God as revealed in Christ, as made known by the Spirit reaching out to us. It whispers to us that the despair and desolation beamed into our homes by news services every day is not the final word. It whispers to us the news that the steadfast love of the Lord, as the author of Lamentation put it later in his poem, never ceases.

desperation rulz ok?

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

And St Martin’s, Duntroon

TWENTY FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (September 18^th) 2022

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 8: 18 – 9: 1

Psalm 79: 1-9

1 Timothy 2: 1-7

Luke 16: 1-13

 

Well here’s a thing. Every three years this little slice of Jesus-teaching comes up in our lectionary. It is one slice that can generate a few furrowed brows. It is, as my gospel conversationalists admitted during the week, a slice that has many of us choosing the Old Testament or epistle reading to preach on instead. Actually I looked back through my records and found that this Sunday three years ago I was preaching at All Saints’ Gladstone, and I did in fact preach on this difficult Jesus story. I spoke about the prickliness of some of the bearers of Christ truth, I talked about Greta Thunberg and mentioned Joan of Arc, Rosa Park, Malala Yousufzai, Rachel Carson, reminding myself and the parishioners there that God and God in Christ chooses unexpected people and unexpected stories to bear divine gospel truth.

Then I put that sermon away, because I have pledged never to preach sermons from the past. The world has changed too much, I have changed, and you are not All Saints’, Gladstone. But the point remains, God turns up in unexpected places and forms, and perhaps Greta Thunberg and Rachel Carson in particular are even more our prophets for today than they were three years ago.

But I won’t go back there, to that sermon. As Christ followers in the late first quarter of the 21st century we are – or should be – painfully aware not only of the vulnerability of our planet, but of the history of the church. For at least 1700 years our flawed human institution has revealed at least a tendency to produce from this Jesus moment not an icon of living for the benefits of others, but of learning simply from the corruption of the corrupt steward. That is not the takeaway of this passage. It is a sad thing if we allow ourselves to be better known for corruption and even predation than for the love that we can sing so glibly about when we sing that song “they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Will they? Our track record isn’t all that good.

So what do we have here? I suspect we have a glimpse of Jesus’ divine sense of humour. I suspect strangely we glimpse a hint of the value of social capital. Perhaps Jesus knew the saying of his philosophical forebear, Plato, when the ancient Greek observed that necessity is the mother of invention. The steward of this Jesus story is crippled by the sheer desperation of his circumstances. But he is smart enough to realise that he can reach out and touch the lives of others to their benefit. Who knows what were the complex motivations of a Greta Thunberg, a Joan of Arc, Rosa Park, Malala Yousufzai, Rachel Carson? Is there such a thing as pure altruism? Is Greta Thunberg somewhere in her angsty adolescent and ADHD driven worldview motivated by something other than pure altruism, pure love for her planet and its species? Who knows? Who knows if even a Rachel Carson wasn’t driven by something other than pure determination to save the planet that in the 1960s was slipping into the horrors of a silent spring brought about by the DDT that Carson spoke out against?

In the last ten days we have seen a powerful example of social capital, as much of the world, and not just the English speaking world or British Commonwealth, has mourned the death of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth of course hardly needed to purchase any social capital but we have seen that she gained it anyway by the sheer integrity of the 70 years in which she did her job.

Certainly I am not suggesting that Queen Elizabeth was corrupt. That was the specuiality of the steward of our Jesus story. I’m not sure that I want to allow the word corrupt to dwell in the same sentence as our former monarch’s name. I’ll let it rest there for illustration purposes only. But what we have seen in her life and death, and what we have seen in the lives and proclamations of those other prickly prophets that I mentioned in my All Saints’ Gladstone sermon three years ago, was the ability to bring benefit to the lives of others. It is, too, that that Jesus leads us in this strange and slightly comic parable. It is in the end an expansion of that other great parable that Luke alone records, the parable of the Good Samaritan. For in each of these stories a boundary is crossed, lives are touched, transformed even, and the love and resurrection hope that dwells in Jesus Christ is proclaimed.

Hopefully in a less corrupt way, and almost certainly in a less profound way than all the famous people I have mentioned, we too are called in our own small way to reach through the boundaries of silence and nonchalance and touch and warm the lives of those around us.

 

Thoughts Following the Death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

 

SERMON/REFLECTION GIVEN AT St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

TWENTY FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (September 21st) 2022

(Sunday following the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 4: 11-12, 22-28

Psalm 14

1 Timothy 1: 12-17

Luke 15: 1- 10

 

I am however ignoring the readings for this week

 

For all of us this is a week that will remain implanted in our memories. I operate usually with a hard and fast rule of not diverting attention from at least a sample of the lectionary readings on a Sunday. But flexibility too is a rule, and just occasionally current events overtake normality. Let me say too that I speak as a ridiculous combination of socialist and monarchist, which makes about as much sense as anything else that hall marks our strange dash from go to whoa.

“A life well lived.” “A lifelong promise kept.” “One of the most inspirational women this world will ever know.” These are the sorts of phrases that we have heard over and again, and justifiably so, these last 72 hours or so. Today we are conscious with citizens of all the countries that we call Common-wealth that a life has passed through ours, no matter how remotely, and that our lives have been the better for it.

For most of us in this place, whatever Queen Elizabeth represented, she alone has represented it. She has been the embodiment of dignity, devotion, and unwavering integrity, even through the darkest and shakiest days of her long reign.

As the Queen has become increasingly frail in the months since she farewelled the husband that she clearly loved we have known that this moment would inevitably come. If I may digress with a personal tale for a moment, some of you will know but I am the possessor of a 100 year old mother. I'm not sure that “possessor” is the technical term, but it will have to do. Throughout her life, since the dark days of World War Two, when the Princess Elizabeth, alongside her father, sought to inspire the confidence and hope of her people in Britain and to a less direct degree throughout the Commonwealth, my mother has looked to Elizabeth with admiration, even one might say “devotion.” The queen I should add was four years her junior, but there was no doubt that the older subject was inspired by the younger inspiration.

With some apprehension I checked on Friday morning to see if my mother, who I contact twice weekly by Zoom, was aware that her inspiration had died. “Well, of course,” said Mrs 100, “What do you expect? She was 96 you know.”

But that aside, and if we return at least loosely to the subject of gospel, if not our gospel or other readings for the day, one of the essential ingredients of the incarnation of God in Christ, God in Jesus the Christ, is the absolute correlation between the command, or what we call Word of God, and the outcome of that command, that Word. Be healed, says Jesus, and a person is healed. Be reconciled, and humanity is reconciled to its Creator.

In the events of the last few days, we have seen the closure of a life which has exemplified, I would dare to say almost to the maximum possible within those confines of being human but not divine, a life that has exemplified that same absolute integrity. If we dug beneath the surface of many of the words spoken these past three days or so they would point to Queen Elizabeth’s life as one spent to the greatest degree humanly possible in the embodiment of integrity.

I think one of the reasons we as a people are so deeply moved by the death of Queen Elizabeth is because, however much we knew it was coming, we were not ready for the closure of a life that so completely connected word and action, promise and implementation. We knew this end was coming, particularly since we saw a suddenly frail old woman, masked and in mourning clothes, lamenting the death of her eccentric but clearly beloved husband. In that moment not so very long ago we were reminded in a different way that royalty are deeply human.

To reflect in this way, and I might add so inadequately, on the life and death of Queen Elizabeth is not in any way to suggest that she was perfect. Were she to sit with us I’m sure she would be the first to assure us that she had many flaws. There was much criticism levelled at her at the time of the death of that noble-tragic figure, that human figure, the Princess of Wales. The Firm seemed for a while to be irreparably damaged, yet a phoenix rose from the ashes, and in the years since we have seen a new model of inspiration arise despite the flaws and the humanness of the principle actors.

Her Majesty would demur if she were to hear much of the praise that has been directed her way these past three days (though she may have approved the warm thoughts of Paddington Bear). I want to say now, in the context of liturgy, only that it seems to me she has thrown herself wilfully, constantly on the mercies of God, the strengthening, uplifting mercies of God, as she has sought to be a person living for others. She had some private life but woefully little, and she knew that would be the case from the moment at such a tender age when she promised to live in the service of her people.

In living out that promise she has modelled the central ingredients of faith, ensuring that she served God and her people not in her own strength but in the strength that God gave her. She sought to change with the changing world, if sometimes reluctantly, while retaining the essentials of her role. She threw herself again and again on the strength and the mercy of the God she knew was primarily her Master. She drew attention away from herself to the needs of her people, seeking always that help of God. Our lives are, thank God, the richer for it.

As it happens, I believe at least one part of her legacy is that our lives will be richer not only because she has in some strange way passed through them, but because she has formed and nurtured, sometimes in cauldrons of struggle, an heir in King Charles III who will continue to serve, to lead, and to inspire all who care to look his way.

So for now we simply give thanks for an inspirational life that is closed, a life of immeasurable integrity, that has passed through our lives, and for which our lives are all the richer. For now we can be deeply grateful for all the inspiration that Queen Elizabeth has been.

“May ‘flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’” said King Charles to his late mother in his first King’s Speech yesterday. To which I would add those beautiful words from the last rites, “May your portion this day be in peace, and your dwelling in the heavenly Jerusalem. Amen.”

on the road again

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

TWENTY SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August 28^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 18: 1-11

Psalm 139: 1-6, 13-18

Philemon 1-21

Luke 14: 25-33

 

 

As you may be aware, Luke constructed a large section of his Jesus story around a loose travelogue. It begins towards the end of Luke 9, at verse 51, and more or less ends with that pivotal scene when he weeps over the city that, as a Jew, he loves beyond words.

That aspect of Luke’s story is not unlike many of the heroic sagas and moral tales of Luke’s time, and Luke would have been thoroughly aware of that. Naturally he believed that his is a tale not of entertainment but of life and death – in we might say an eternal context. Jesus will weep over the city he loves, enter it, be crucified there, and then the story will not end.

Although there’s also a sense in which the story bifurcates, splits in two. The Acts narrative goes on to tell of the work of the spirit in taking Jesus and his gospel to the ends of the earth and perhaps of time. We could say there is a hidden parallel narrative – and that takes us into the story of the risen, ascended Christ, together with the expectation that he will in some way return again to wind up human and cosmic history, and declare all things finished and all things made new.

In that eternal framework, for want of a better phrase, Luke tells us that the upside down vision that Mary had, and of which she sang at the time of the Annunciation, is finally fulfilled. Mary told us that the poor will be exalted and the mighty torn down, and, to borrow the words of a much later woman, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. But I’m getting ahead of Luke’s story.

More of that another time, perhaps. But in the midst of Luke’s travelogue this week we have Jesus using powerful, provocative, almost offensive words to overthrow at least symbolically the very basis of almost every society. Love me. Hate all else.

Jesus is not giving us here, a basis for fratricide or matricide or any other cide or form of family murder. He is using hyperbole, dramatic exaggeration, forcefully to drive home his point.

Eleventh century saint, Anselm of Canterbury, devised an argument for the existence of God. That argument needn’t detain us here, Though it has kept philosophers entertained for centuries, as they either approve or disprove of it. But Anselm gave us the wonderful phrase “That than which no greater can be conceived.” Or, as I used to say to primary school religion classes, “the biggest thing in your life.” Fishing? Rugby? Money, sex, power, love, horses, sunsets? Your mother, your father? the list goes on endlessly and meaninglessly, as Jesus hints provocatively.

For in a vastly different context Jesus is using a similar tool to that of Anselm. What is the biggest most precious thing in our lives? Parents, children, loved ones? They should be pretty big factors in our lives. Shrink them, says Jesus. It's a big ask.

He goes on to speak of instruments of death, the cross. He puts following him into the context of love that is greater than life, greater than the love of life itself. It’s a very very intentional decision, the decision to follow Jesus.

When I left Darwin some years ago, I drove, not for the first time, across that great red continent. As I pulled out of our driveway onto the main highway south, my GPS announced “For 1375 kilometres go straight on.” At the end of 1375 kilometres the electronic voice announced “At the roundabout take the second exit.” After taking that exit in Alice Springs she announced, “For 1234 kilometres continue straight on.”

It had a feeling of resolution even in an age of air conditioned comfort, as I let out the clutch and headed south. Yet that is minuscule compared to the risky journey that Jesus of Nazareth calls us to. On the other hand, he does give us an eternity of help along the way.