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.