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.