glory and derision

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (February 20^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Genesis 45: 3-11, 15

Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40

1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50

Luke 6: 27-38

 

 

At the risk of being somewhat autobiographical the major element of my journey in faith is that it has been the outcome of a very clear choice. A conversion, undertaken in my early adulthood. I was young, perhaps a little troubled by life, the universe and most things. My choice to believe was not in the league of a C. S. Lewis or a T. S. Eliot, two of my great icons of faith.

I make no secret that I prefer the latter, but I know only too well that I can hardly compare my small existence with either of theirs. Still, I decided, in the privacy of my own mind, that I would abandon my atheism, such as it was, and embrace belief in the strange way of Jesus Christ

I say “belief,” but faith is not the dry academic experience that this word sometimes indicates. It was a belief that seized my heart long before the slow tickings of my mind followed suit. “Cardiac,” rather than “cranial” belief. Both though have meandered along in fits and starts in the 42 years and 50 weeks and innumerable twists and turns since then.

For this faith traveller, then, the leap was from no-belief – or belief in no-thing beyond that which I could see – to belief, belief in that which I could not see. Pretty much anything else – almost everything else – was reasonably easy after that. Doctrinally speaking, that is. The actual task of being a follower of Jesus was less easy, and there have been many stumbles, some mildly spectacular, at least in the theatre of my own mind, ever since. But also there has been God’s Spirit.

Nevertheless minor details like the Trinity, Creation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the latter so central to Paul’s belief and proclamation, have been reasonably easy to go along with ever since. Other, what we might call lesser doctrines and miracles have been just that: lesser. The nature miracles, healings, exorcisms related in the texts of faith are not something I dwell on greatly. They are important parts of the story related by the biblical authors, but who knows what underlies them? They point to greater truths, and so be it. “Jesus is Lord,” as Paul emphasized, is the creed that matters, and all else is subservient to that.

But the word “lord,” I’ve come to learn over the years, is of immeasurable importance. That is why I refuse to have it replaced by less important descriptors, like “liberator,” in the collects and other prayers of our liturgy. Sure, our Lord liberates us, and many things beside, but he liberates out of his Lordship, and it is the claim that he is Lord that was the creed by which he lived and died and by which his followers were prepared to live and die.

Paul saw, though, that the resurrection of Jesus was, in the vernacular, the proof of the pudding. Lots of people were executed, especially under tyrannical regimes like that of the Romans. They still are. Almost certainly this day in Myanmar and Afghanistan and countless other sites of oppression activists will lose their lives for justice. Their lives I believe will be caught up into the Resurrection hope of Jesus. Some will be long-remembered. Most will be soon-forgotten. And if that is the whole of the story then we are, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, more to be pitied than all people.

More to be pitied because we have staked our lives on the pie in the sky, and the pie like Jimmy Webb’s infamous cake, left out in the rain, has crumbled into nothingness. It probably didn’t do us any harm, but as Paul acerbically notes elsewhere, we might just as well have lived by a less demanding creed: eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. But resurrection? I can’t prove it. It belongs in that category that Van Morrison called “inarticulate speech of the heart.” It is heart language, unscientific language, but language that can seize and transform our entire lives from the inside out. And however dark life has sometimes been, I wouldn’t be without it (though I don’t wish to be tested too much on that one: “do not bring us to the test,” as one translation of Jesus’ great prayer puts it).

Paul as it happens held to another central doctrine of faith. Perhaps it’s one I’ll go into in more depth anther time, but it’s another that I believe we jettison at great risk. The doctrine of judgement has been abused throughout two thousand years of Christian preaching, turned into a text of terror. It is a text of comfort. It is not “turn or burn,” but “turn and be loved.” It is a doctrine that invites us to turn from a world in which we see only, at best, through a glass darkly, to one in which we see God face to face, know the eternity of God’s embrace, the surety of divine love for us and for all who we love (and countless we do not!). It is a moment and an unseen eternity in which we are asked not about material or more tangible aspects of our being, but about our ability and practice of love. Do we show, have we shown the kind of love that Joseph (no saint, incidentally) shows as he forgives his brothers? Do we show, have we shown the kind of love that forgives those who wrong us, forgives even our enemies?

I don’t. But that’s not the end of the story of judgement, for Christianity has long taught the plea, the judgement that we are seen not as we stand alone, but as we stand in Christ. It is, incidentally no coincidence that my favourite hymn is “And now O Father, Mindful of the Love”: “only look on us as found in him,” wrote William Bright. He added incidentally, for those of us who often fret for loved ones, those poignant lives,

And then for those, our dearest and our best,

by this prevailing presence we appeal:

O fold them closer to thy mercy’s breast.”

I happen to believe that includes all people, but that is a conversation for another time. For now it is all we need to know that on that Day, whatever that means, the God, belief in whom has at sometime captured you and me, will murmur only, “my friend, have you loved?” Our answer, is that and must be that of William Bright, or more correctly that of the Jesus who beckons us come: “only look on us as found in him.”

And however strange that faith in Jesus may sometimes seem, I am glad that 42 years and 50 weeks ago I stumbled into the company of the poet who wrote

They shall praise thee and suffer in every generation

With glory and derision.

                                    T. S. Eliot, “A Song for Simeon.”

bolting horses of life

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (February 13^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Jeremiah 6:1-8 (9-13)                                    

Psalm 1

1 Corinthians 15: 12-20

Luke 5:17-26

 

About 15 years ago, when we were living in outback Queensland, my daughter and I used to go out riding our horses as a break from my work and her study. One afternoon, as we headed out across the thousand acre paddock where we kept our horses (catching them in so vast an area was another sermon in itself) my big thoroughbred and I had a small disagreement. Perhaps he was spooked by a snake or something, but he suddenly took off in a full thoroughbred gallop.

We had a few negotiations over his speed and direction, but like many negotiations there came a moment when I knew the case was lost. I was kind of winning the directional battle, and he was winning on the speed issue. I was left with one last futile card in the negotiations, that terribly lame plea that almost always falls on deaf ears when a horse is bolting. “Whoa” I cried, desperately. He ignored me, accelerated, changed direction again, and the next thing I knew the girth had slipped (I had not yet tightened it after saddling up) and I was flying through the air towards the one construction that was harder than the ground in that brutally stony outback paddock. We’ll leave me there.

But I want to suggest that the visceral, fear-filled cry that I so futilely offered that day was far closer to the meaning of the “woes” offered in Jesus’ vivid Beatitudes and Woes in his Sermon on the plain. As Christians we have tended to heart the English word “woe” as a fierce warning, to listen up or else. Too often Christian preaching has yet again found some threat of eternal punishment in the woe phrases pronounced by Jesus. Yet the word translated “woe,” used fifteen times in Luke’s account of Jesus, is far closer to my forlorn and hopeless “whoa” than any sense of eternal punishment. The words are a warning, with the plaintive character of a plea. “Whoa,” I cried out to my horse, “desist, or this will end badly.” Unfortunately he was smart enough to know it was only me that would end up hurt, and he had some serious eating to get on with.

Desist, or this will end badly. The words are directed very firmly at would-be followers. proclaimers of Jesus. He delivers a series of words of happiness, “blessings,” then offers the shadow side. We can engage in the hard work of prioritizing Jesus, engage in the hard work of sacrifice for Jesus, the hard work of identification with the poor the hungry, the weeping, the reviled, or we can wallow in our self-importance, our comfort, our luxuriating at the expwene of the survival of others. Luke warned us chapters earlier that the world of Jesus-following is an Alice in Wonderland, upside-down world: Mary warned us, rejoicing in a world in which the mighty are torn down and the lowly and broken exalted. “Which side are you on” asks the famous union song of the 1930s. Jesus asks the same 1900 years earlier. Blessing, or whoa?

As you will probably know by now, I have a deep sense that the crises we are facing in the 2020s, as church and as western civilization and indeed as human, are what we might as Christians call the judgement of God. The Greek word krisis – it’s obvious what English word we get from that! – is used for the depiction of Judgement Day, but it carries all the connotations of a time of critical decision. Scientists speak of our era in many terms of judgement, far beyond the eleventh hour, the Sixth Great Extinction being perhaps the most chilling. The time for “whoa” for planet earth and species humanity might well be over, though we hope and pray not. We live in a time, as Covid and a myriad distortions of reality remind us, when we may well be fling over the ears of creation’s, or Papatuanuku’s furious determination to buck our presence from her back. There are no cosy prophylactics for us from that, no cushions, even, to land on. Probably.

But ours is a faith that finds God even after the deepest whoa. There is for humanity – including us – no get of gaol free card. Humanity is currently facing what may even be its final crises of global warming, recurrent virus mutations, and all the unpredictable personal vicissitudes that stare us down. Jesus’ words to those gathered on the plain pull no punches, and Nature’s words to us in 2021 pull no punches either. She too can be a prophet of God. But we are privileged to hear that sometimes faint, sometimes deafening echo of the words that Paul offered his people, himself in a time of crisis: hang on to Christ-hope despite all odds, and your faith is not futile. The Corinthians had forgotten that. Too often I fear we – or maybe I speak only for me, are Corinthians.

But our task is, enabled by the Spirit of Christ, to hang on to that Resurrection hope. It is also to bear that Resurrection hope to those around us as we all pass through a judgement, a crisis time. And somewhere just beyond our clear hearing, there is as the New Testament writers saw so clearly, a voice reminding us that we will be welcomed home.

Even as we fly over the ears of our bolting horses of life.

When How Long Ends

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (February 6^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)                                          

Psalm 138

1 Corinthians 15: 1-11

Luke 5:1-11

 

One of the great, archetypal human cries is the cry “how long.” This can be the all too human cry when we face our own death and the death of those we love. The answer to that cry can never be more than a guess, filled with complexity, and to be honest pastoral training would tell us that the best answer is neither more nor less than a gentle touch, a squeeze of the hand, a hug, ort the sharing of a tear, whatever the recipient is comfortable with. The cry is somewhat universalised at the moment as even we, until now so quarantined in the south, watch the onward tread of the Omicron variant and wonder how long we have before the mayhem, mild or manic, spreads amongst us.

To some extent that is a different thing. To some extent. We’ve done our best as a nation, we hope, and we must leave the rest to nature, science, politics and above all (for us) God. And it’s of course to that dimension, the unseen, unprovable dimension, that we are forced by our readings (as it should be). The God-dimension. The same dimension that invades Isaiah’s life and challenges, leads him to speak a word of divine wrath to his people. “Through the wrath of the Lord the land is darkened” he will soon say to his complacent people. It’s not a way to win popularity stakes.

Yet in the present we have real parallels with Isaiah’s world. We have a form of American Christianity that has swept the world with obscene distortions of the gospel message – shortly in New Zealand with will have, if organizers have their way, a mission from Franklin Graham, that poor manipulator of his father Billy’s name, coming to spread his hate-filled version of Christianity here. False prophets like Franklin Graham and others who have so distorted the gospel message that former president Trump becomes to them a servant of God, these manipulators of faith represent precisely the corruption of religion that Isaiah dared to oppose. He did so in fear and trembling: who was he to speak out against the popular religious fervour (and self-satisfaction) of his time? But he was God’s chosen and dares to speak God’s disturbing priorities of peace and justice, to foretell God’s desecration of their land – to announce as it were their own version of Omicron sweeping through their lives and no immediate relief from a blight and a plight that could last for centuries if God so wished.

The harsh fact for those who believe that faith in God is some sort of insurance policy protecting us from ill is that the sun shines and the rain pours on just and unjust alike. Those whoso twist Christian forms that believers expected to be airlifted out of apocalyptic trial – whether they be pandemic or rising sea levels or troops massing on each side of the Ukrainian border, these are matters that were ever thus, and no divine airlift is promised to followers of any particular religious belief, Christian or otherwise. Famous passages about rapture, about graves opening and releasing their dead, about farmers buzzed up from their fields as others are infamously left behind, these are not about a get out of gaol for the elect. They are profound passages – like the entire book of Isaiah, or for that matter Revelation – that simply promise that God’s will will be done, that God’s “yes,” God’s final word of justice and compassion will eventually reverberate through the universes, and our death and the deaths of those we love will not have the final say.

This does not mean that those who claim, as we do, to be followers of Christ, are privileged, but neither does it mean that we are left abandoned in an empty universe. Again and again figures like the psalmist or indeed Paul the Apostle urge us to maintain our link with our creating, redeeming, hope-bringing God. We are urged to pray – I don’t think it matters how – and to offer, as we will say later in the liturgy “our thanks and praise.” The great disciplines of liturgy can help us with that, which is in part why we continue this stylized habit of eucharist, this holy communion with God, with ancestors and saints, with one another, Sunday by Sunday and other times besides. Give thanks, says St. Paul, in all circumstances, however gritted our teeth, however dark the horizon seems. Cling to God – and when that no longer works, permit God to cling to you, to me, in all the confusion and doubt -as well as occasional joy and laughter – that surrounds us.

Above all, says Paul, be a clinging-to-resurrection people. Because of that, and because of the divine judgement enwrapped in that, we must strive to be a justice-people and a compassion-people and a love people too. We will not ever make sense of this mystery. We can’t. But it can make sense of us. The hope of the God who brings light out of darkness and life out of death can cling to us, no matter what we are feeling, and even as often as we let God down. Cling to it, says Paul, for without the hope of resurrection we are more to be pitied than all people. Pitied because, having the light, we obliterate the light. One day, one immeasurable day when light shines for all creation and all humanity, at the end of the How Long,  we will be aware that to darken the light with our small minds and knowledges and doubts was futile. So Paul reminds us, firmly to cling to resurrection hope, and to let it cling to us.

To cling to that, and to let ourselves be encouraged by those who have been inspired in dark times and in light, in trouble and in joy, to bear witness through our attitudes and actions and words, to the one who is resurrection hope.