partiers and whingers

SERMON PREACHED AT St ALBAN’S, KUROW

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 27^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

Joshua 5: 9-12

Psalm 32

2 Cor 5: 16-21

Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32

 

It’s not hard to find points of contact between our reading from Paul and our gospel reading. Luke, recounting the Jesus parable of two sons, takes us to imagery that is at the heart of Paul’s instructions to the stroppy Corinthians to involve themselves – ourselves – in lives marked by reconciliation. It would be lovely to say the Christian community received Paul’s great message and Christ-bearers got on with the task of loving one another thereafter. After a few decades of involvement in Christian circles I am sad to say this doesn’t always appear to be so, though there have been rare occasions when a figure like Desmond Tutu has emerged to model reconciliation on once warring factions.

There are other moments of reconciliation in our readings. The wandering Hebrews become reconciled to their renewed relationship with God – though it takes a few decades – and settle somewhat controversially into the land God promised them, where they renege on their promises once more. The psalmist becomes reconciled to the complexities of human existence and its frailties – God knows we know them at least in theory in our strange world of 2022, even in New Zealand – and seeks some sort of safe haven in God’s presence. But I want us to reflect on where we might stand in the striking Jesus Parable that has, at least since the writings of Kenneth Bailey in the 1970s, come to be known as the Parable of the Two Sons.

For I for one know my propensity to go astray, to sow wild oats – though I was singularly unsuccessful in my attempts to do so throughout my wilder days! – yet equally to sulk when others receive the preferment that I consider should be mine. I won’t name names but I can’t help thinking of one New Zealand politician having a little whinge this week past when he felt that disadvantaged minority groups in this country were being given preferment that he considered to be his white middle class entitlement. But I too can whinge like that, at least in my thoughts: how dare so and so have a better car, a better job, a better house than I do?

In such times, too, I tend to forget to look downhill. I fail to ask myself how dare I have three too-large meals a day, have a large house that could fit several families in many parts of the world, and head for bed at night without the fear of Putin’s obscene bombs heading for my family. Perhaps I too forget that my life expectancy – even as already realized – is greater than that of many who do not share my whakapapa, my educational opportunities, my literacy and my numeracy (pathetic though the latter is), because I have been far more greatly advantaged by dint of my living on the right side of the tracks.

Perhaps for once I will allow the better part of preaching valour to be brevity. I simply want to suggest that, though Jesus ends his story with a sulking older sun and a nonplussed but rejoicing younger one, it is you and me who are invited to complete the story. Do we become a people of joy, who join in celebration with the younger brother who has indeed thrown his life away, yet returned penitent? Do we receive and welcome him (will I, as and if Covid settles receive and welcome those with whom I’ve vehemently disagreed these past many months? When? Do I still resent those who stood on the opposite side of the Springbok Tour debate all those decades ago? How long is too long? How soon too soon?). And equally will I share a celestial beer with the older brother who has so vehemently drawn a line in the sand and said “never”?

I suspect the answer would be “no” to both – were I not to enlist the help of God. And it is to enlist that help we are called to pray each Lent.

lenten oasis

 

SERMON (/MEDITATION?) GIVEN AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT (March 20^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Isaiah 55:1-9

Psalm 63:1-8

1 Cor 10:1-13

Luke 13: 1-9             

 

As you may imagine, given the epidemiological, political, environmental and economic times we find ourselves in I find myself engaged in all but endless conversations about the future. Perhaps I should hold that thought over until advent, which is supposed to be the future-guessing season of the year, but I am inclined to think that Lent, too asks us to scan the horizon for the signs and directives of God. Lent after all is a time of self-reflection, and self-searching, and self-searching without the aid of God, the aid of the Christ-bearing Spirit of God, is likely to be a reasonably unproductive or certainly underproductive exercise.

So Luke takes us in a series of Jesus moments in which more than one gauntlet is cast at our feet. It’s worth remembering that as our gospel scenes unfold Luke has Jesus on a resolute journey that is a journey towards death. But because we have heard the stories before we have just a hunch that death is not going to be the end of this story, and in times of considerable gloom across the pages of humanity’s journey it’s not such a bad thing to have a spoiler or two here. We are, Paul reminds us, more to be pitied than all people if we have no resurrection in our faith. We’re in Lent but here is a hint of light just beyond the next Full Moon. Which is just as well, because I suspect the same pharmaceutical manufacturers who have done rather well out of Covid antidotes may well be doing well out of antidepressants, too, in this era.

But in our Lenten journey we have come down from the mountain, and we suddenly encounter some of the darker attitude of humanity. About this time, we might read, Jesus learned that Putin had given orders for civilians to be killed in the service of his lust for power and a Russian Empire. And Jesus turns with some passion on those who think – as some Christian fundamentalists do – that the innocent victims deserve their fate. The bystanders ask Jesus if the possibly a thousand or more Ukrainians killed in a theatre bombing deserved their fate. The obscenity of those first questions put to Jesus today is immeasurable, and the answer of Jesus is not without its stark warning: those attitudes lead to death, spiritual if not actual. So incidentally do the attitudes that declare that all Ukrainians are Nazis – a bitter irony if ever there was one as President Zelensky is in fact Jewish – but human intelligence is an early victim of propaganda.

I don’t entirely digress. There is much ugliness in our news sources each day – it was ever thus, because bad news sells, but there is somewhat of an overdose at present. Or perhaps that’s just me? We should all make the wonderful website Daily encourager or Channel One’s Good Sorts compulsory viewing. Maybe that’s why we should not be afraid this Lent to glimpse ahead to the hope that is Easter. Besides, liturgical theologians tell us that Sundays in Lent are not actually in Lent at all, but that’s another story.

Still, Luke doesn’t leave us despairing in any case. The Gardener in our fig tree Jesus-story remonstrates with the Master … hang on, bro … perhaps if I till and manure the fig tree? Please give it a chance? We might recall in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion that the Creator kneels in the dirt of the garden to make the miscreant couple clothes to warm them and cover their new-found nakedness. God the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the gardener kneels with us, postpones for us, even breaks objectionable Sabbath interpretations for us so that we can see the glimpse of resurrection light in the midst of the darkness of human turmoil. In the verse just after our official passage, as those of you who have seen the Gospel Conversations will know, and which I included just now, we are reminded that gospel is like a weed, like mustard seed, hard to eradicate despite the shrubs and darkness and heaviness all around us. While at present there is much gloom, the fact is that here in North Oamaru, or deep in the horrors of Ukraine’s Kyiv or Mariupol some are clinging tenaciously to hope, and in Russians streets brave citizens are marching against the obscenity of Putin’s narcissistic war.

There is much that could be said. There is much darkness, as I said, epidemiological, political, environmental and economic, even darkness I suspect for the future of our parish, even our diocese, in the struggle-streets we dwell in. But Luke allows us the spoiler: darkness is not the final word. Although Jesus trudges towards Jerusalem to die we are allowed a reminder that the mustard seed will break through all odds and invite the birds to nestle in its soothing comfort.

Or as the Psalmist and Isaiah put it years before Jesus’ ministry (though in whose footsteps he firmly placed himself), those who thirst will find God, even in the most parched of metaphorical lands.

transcending molasses

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (March 13^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 15:1-2, 17-18

Psalm 27

Philippians 3:17 – 4:1

Luke 9: 28-36

 

 

Having heard Paul wax eloquent about those whose fixation is their belly it is a little hard to refocus on the strange mysteries of Transfiguration that we encounter in today’s gospel reading. Given that Paul’s attack on the “belly-centred” is an attack on any who are obsessed with their own rights and privileges I have to admit that I too easily could earn his wrath. But what has that to do with a Mount of Transfiguration or a timeless promise to a patriarch. The psalmist cries out for God’s mercy and protection. I get that – but can I ever really get that when I watch the merciless world of Ukraine unfolding, neither the first nor the last cataclysm we all have witnessed in our mainly privileged lives, but know I have no adequate words?

Is there, in the uneasy relation between the scenarios of our Lenten readings, some  revelation of the height and breadth and depth of the majesty of God and gospel, God in the mysteries and in the whole range of human experience, good, bad, cataclysmic?

Let’s glance for example at Abraham, this father of nations. How hard it is to believe a promise! Sad though it is to say we now live in a society (perhaps we always did?) when truth is fiction and fiction is truth. Some years ago I had cause to preach on this reversal of decency: having been dismissed from a position from the church on the basis of untruth and injustice I struggled for some time to find the footsteps of God or gospel in the church – though I did in wider society. Where do we find truth when it is not only presupposed that political truths and promises are, as one Australian Prime Minister infamously expressed it, core and non-core, but when in either category truth is disposable? When truth is fake news and idiocies are truth and tinfoil hats rule?

It is not only political punters, the likes of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, for whom truth is fiction and fiction is truth. In a time of darkness I found that some church leaders too are cavalier with honesty. It is, then, remarkably hard to understand how Abraham, millennia before, could cling to, could live and die by a promise made by an unseen God. Yet whatever else we may believe about the Jewish and Christian scriptures, countless myriads have found in them unshakeable truth. I was left, having swum in the molasses of lies spun by church-people, wondering with Pontius Pilate: what is truth?

I wouldn’t be here today, sharing a glimpse, a snippet of testimony, if the molasses hadn’t become more viscous, more swimmable, the lies exposed at least in part. More important: I glimpsed transfiguration. I saw truths in the support of family and trusted friends, many outside the church, a remnant within. In the deepest depths of that torrid time I took time out to drive a couple of thousand kilometres across rural Australia. It could equally have been New Zealand, albeit over shorter distances. But there in the vastness I glimpsed the hints of transfigurement, of faith breaking through darkness, of mountain tops above dense clouds. I glimpsed the promises, the majesty, the unchangeability of God.

I’m not Abraham. Perhaps in any case, in these slightly apocalyptic times (there have been many before and may be many again) I am standing near the end of family lineages, with all humanity teetering on the edge of dark unknowns. But the confusions of Covid, or the horrors of a Russian sociopath doing his best to restructure the globe, these have not so far shaken the faith I rediscovered in the weeks and months after I thought my vocation in the church was gone. They might if I were in Ukraine, but even so.

In the majesty of Ranginui and his heavens, the volatility of Papatuanuku, in both the ancient forms of the big red western isles and our hugely diverse younger lands,  I found glimpses of what Abraham saw in the vastness of his skies. I saw promise. I will never leave you nor forsake you. The Australian rural heavens or the vaulted skies above McKenzie Country or the Maniototo, these speak equally loud of the constancy of God. I saw the signature and the promise of a Creator who is bigger than petty liars or global sociopaths. My own career, even my existence came to matter less, and the majestic love of God came to matter more. The sky is big.

Of course, like the disciples who got it all badly wrong on the Mount of Transfiguration, I had to come down from the mountain. I got many things wrong. I always have and always will. The disciples began to in-fight and whinge, and God knows I’ve been far from exemplary since my little, rather unimportant-to-anyone-but-me time of trial five years ago. I continue to get things wrong – that’s why I use the verb “blunder” when I speak of my work as ministry educator or archdeacon or even as your interim priest.

But I don’t blunder alone, and the footsteps of Jesus, as you have already heard me say often, are still warm. They are still warm even when in my confusions I seem not to find them.

The three disciples experienced a pinnacle experience, a foretaste of resurrection, before they came down and joined Jesus on his dogged way to Jerusalem. After such experience they were bemused, for he was speaking often of execution. He wasn’t making sense. He often doesn’t.

My deep trough ended. I was reinstated to the position that I had lost, though I never returned to it. There have been many little troughs and peaks since, and despite my prayers there will be troughs as well as peaks ahead, too. But if I can claim one thing in common with Abraham, I encountered the promise that God is bigger than the stars, bigger than time. And if I can claim one connection with the transfiguration-watching disciples I can in Christ descend mountains and ascend valleys and either way my really rather unimportant life is as precious to God as the life of every sparrow that falls, every disciple who blunders yet stutters gospel through millennia, every ancient Hebrew patriarch who dares to believe despite all human logic.

And yours is too.

in arid places

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT (March 6^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Deuteronomy 26: 1-11

Psalm 91: 1-2, 9-16

Romans 10: 8b-13

Luke 4: 1-13

 

 

 

In the vast screeds of pew news that you take home with you this week I mention that our small slice of that critically important Hebrew Scriptural book Deuteronomy is in fact the oldest slice of scripture that we or our Jewish sisters and brothers have. Originally recited as a creed, it places the encounter with God first in the initiative of God, and secondly in an act of deliverance.

The “wandering Aramean” is lost, is in a place of hostility, is in a broken and frightening world. He is in a world where a superpower attacks a nuclear power-station with missiles, where people who could be us flee in terror or fight with determination a foe all but infinitely greater than themselves. The wandering Aramean was not having a cosy, cuddly time with Jesus and some friends on a sunny afternoon, but was in a state of desperation. There, his descendants recall, begins the delivering, healing, redeeming work of God.

Let’s not fool ourselves. A few mattresses and tents burning on the steps of parliament were deeply disturbing, and serve to remind us that our comfortable little country is not Utopia. It never was, as those in leaky homes or none, and those dispossessed of culture and land for many generations could testify. We too have an ugly underbelly, as the mosque attack back in the pre-COVID days of 2019 should have indelibly reminded us. We are vulnerable both to nature – as Christchurch’s earthquakes, climate change, and the ever-present threat of the Alpine Fault should always remind us – and to human-sourced evil: Aramoana, Christchurch, or the endless list of youth suicides and domestic murders remind us.

Because nature and humanity alike can perpetrate tragedy, freedom is illusory. Those who have taunted our Prime Minister with threats of hanging would do well to recall, as they slink away from the site of their ill-advised camps, that Jacinda Ardern is not Vladimir Putin, and the very freedom they claim not to have is and always will be conditional freedom, conditional on circumstances, dangers and threats, human and natural.

The Hebrew people of our Deuteronomy creed knew that only too well. By and large they became a wandering people for large slices of their history, surrounded by or enslaved to more powerful tribes and nations. Since 1949 the State of Israel has been in different circumstances, and I for one suspect they have forgotten the God of justice and compassion as they respond to undoubted provocation with over-the-top military and economic muscle. But the State of Israel is not the people of God – and if God is the God of the oppressed then God’s energies now are firmly anchored in the suffering of the people of Ukraine (as well as Myanmar, Afghanistan, and the endless list of oppressed peoples).

The wandering Aramean cried out in his suffering as surely as the people of Ukraine are at this very moment. Scriptural history books foreshorten time (to use, if I recall correctly, a term borrowed from the visual arts). Who knows how long it took for the wandering Aramean, for those around him, and for those descended from his loins, to experience the deliverance of God? Let us pray that the suffering of the Ukrainians is over rapidly, that the world responds, that machinations of evil are smashed quickly.

But it may not be so. Perhaps, as president Zelesnkyy chillingly prophesies, Europe is facing its death throes. And when we get far enough beyond Ukraine to remember COVID, and far enough beyond COVID to remember climate change and plastic sludge tides, perhaps we are too. But somewhere, somehow, humans became the people of God, because a wandering Aramean cried out in desperation, and because God heard and responded to his cries, and the cries of his kinsfolk.

That is where what I like to call “cardiac belief” begins. Belief is not of the head, but from deep within our inner being – our heart, we would say, our bowels other cultures might say. If nothing else, as we watch the horrors of Eastern Europe, horrors that we naively felt we had left behind in 1989, we can learn to cry from our hearts.

For too long western Christians have played games of self-satisfaction with Scripture. If you look closely the devil does just that in his approach to scripture in today’s Temptation narrative. The Devil, Mephistopheles, Satan, whatever we might call this Opposer of Good and God, knows scripture well.  Satan is the sort who says to simple folk, only believe and you will be safe from COVID, safe from cancer, safe from death. Who says, pray and grow rich. Who obsesses with sexual behaviours – and I refer only to those that are not predatory – but ignores issues of justice. Satan is the sort who said to the fourth century Emperor Constantine “in this sign – of a cross – you will conquer” – and turned the instrument of salvation back into an instrument of conquest, oppression and death. But Jesus knows scripture better, and shuns the devil, shuns power, and becomes the Servant King.

The Temptations begin and end in an arid place. We are in an arid place. There are global and local, social and ecclesiastical signs of our aridity. Ukraine is burning. Tides are rising. Papatuanuku is suffocating. Aotearoa’s complacency is being challenged. The Church is crumbling. We are in arid places.

Arid places, like the one where a wandering Aramean became a child of God. Arid places like the one in which Jesus turned his back on the values of complacent, self-satisfied society and breathed gospel instead.

Surrender to, dependence on, even love for God begins in the desert, in a tempest, in oppressive darkness. It is there that gospel light shines. Not an escape clause, a get out of gaol free clause, but the darkness-conquering light of the God of the Cross. Not “bad things won’t happen” – surely the ministry of Jesus in whose footsteps we are called to follow will remind us that – but “bad things are not the end.” It may seem risible, impossible, ridiculous, but it is the discovery the great saints of God have found at least since the time an Aramean wandered lonely and frightened and oppressed in an arid place in Egypt. So too can we discover and rediscover, as we ask God to breathe navigation into our lostness, light into our darkness.

 

The Lord be with you.