kumbaya, love, and skittles?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, OAMARU Nth

THIRD SUNDAY of EASTER (May1st ) 2022

 

READINGS:

 Acts 9: 1-20

Psalm 30

Revelation 5: 11-14

John 21: 1-19

 

There’s an awful lot of reconciliation going on in this Johannine account of a resurrection appearance of Jesus. As Dr Gerry Morris pointed out on our online Gospel Conversation, John provides a whole lot of flags to suggest that reconciliation is a really important part of following the newly risen Christ. The Peter who warmed his hands by a charcoal (Gk: anthrax) fire as he was deserting the one he pledged to follow endlessly, now encounters the Risen Lord beside another charcoal fire at a beach barbecue breakfast. Jesus, the one who was deserted, provides kai [meal/food] for Peter the deserter. This is an unimaginable act of table-fellowship, of manaakitanga [hospitality], above all, of grace. To add to the grace-imagery we might note that Jesus has, seemingly with some rather over the top miraculous intervention, provided an overkill of grace – 153 fish, presumably not anchovies, and it seems some sort of supply of bread to wrap it in. That is a fair-sized breakfast feast.

Reconciliation. I speak as one who has generally not harboured grudges, but there’s not an awful lot that is meritorious in that. I have a memory like a sieve for many matters and tend to forget whatever I might have nursed as a grievance. But amnesia is not merit, and I now I have tucked away one or two serious grudges over the years – the host who turfed me out of his house one day, forcing me to drive, tired, nearly a thousand kilometres through the night to get my family home. The colleague who won my trust, gleaned some of my most private feelings, and then turned out to be the leader of a pack baying for my metaphorical blood and literal dismissal. The very fact I have recounted these unrelated tales is proof enough that yours truly is far from gaining any merit on the reconciliation journey.

And partly that’s okay. Peter after all denied Jesus three times – I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Jesus asks him to declare his love three times before commissioning him to a somewhat grisly mission, commissions him, as John notes, to living and dying as a Jesus-follower. Divine forgiveness, Jesus had long since told his followers, reaches to seventy times seven – which means “infinity times infinity,” not 490, incidentally – and there are broad hints that such grace is attainable only by the invasion of the one we call Spirit. The one whose "task" is making Jesus present to and within us, making all that we need to know of God present to us and for us. Peter goes on to get it reasonably right from here on, though we get glimpses of his relationship with Prickly Paul that suggest all was not always kumbaya, love, and skittles.

And it’s not for us, either. Firstly, no one is suggesting some sort of cheap grace here. Jesus doesn’t wave an airy hand to Peter and say “Yeah, look, no worries mate.” The awkward exchange forces Peter to reassess himself, and I suspect he was uncharacteristically introspective as he chomped on his fishy barbecue in the hours that followed. No one expects a Ukrainian mother to wave a disinterested hand to a Russian who has bombed or raped her family. No one expects a victim of domestic violence to cheerfully pronounce that her – or his – story doesn’t matter. It does.

We are challenged to hope and heal. As it happens I am a believer in universal salvation – I don’t believe anyone can resist in the end the painful but persuasive redeeming love of God. Though now we see love and sin alike only through darkened glass, but there must come a time – if there is a God – when the scales fall from our eyes and we see how great our need of God is, and how inadequate we are in grasping that love without the love-help of the Risen Lord. 

And then at last we might stutter with Peter, “you know I love you – and how badly I blew it.” I don’t believe in an eternal hell – or hell at all. But I believe in purgatory – that long searching look by which we are exposed to Christlight and persuaded to surrender our darkness. Even a Putin – though neither I nor the gospel deny that’s a tough call.

But I partly digress. And in any case I want to end not with Jesus, as Esther Clarke-Prebble put it on the Gospel Conversation, doing the housework, or as I prefer because I’m a bloke, barbecuing on the beach.

I want to end with that inspirational vision of another John, as he speaks of the Risen Christ, portrayed as a Lamb who conquered all suffering, the Risen Christ reading from what we might call the Book of Eternal Life: “praise, honour, glory and strength forever and ever to the one who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.”

As we learn to chant those words in the depths of our hearts (and it’s a life time of learning) however great our wobbles and however dark our inner recesses, it seems at least to this flawed pilgrim that we can join Peter in his reconciliation with the one he deserted. Aided by God’s Spirit  join Peter and stumble along, as Jesus beckons “follow me,” stumble and dance along filled with Resurrection Joy.

tyrants and saviours

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

PALM SUNDAY (April 10^th) 2022

 

READINGS: 

Isaiah 50: 4-9a 

Psalm 31: 10-18

Philippians 2: 10-18

Luke 19: 28-40

 

Picture yourself, not as the Beatles might wish, in a boat on a river,  but tucked up in a single bed, waking up, slowly becoming aware that your house was shaking, that the windows were rattling, that rain was lashing them. Picture the discovery that when I – for yeah it was me – dared to emerge from beneath the pillows, that visibility was little more than a couple of metres and the sound was all but deafening. Actually it was yards, not metres, because metrics were yet to be introduced in New Zealand but never mind that. The shady form of the tall matai tree, just visible through the driving rain, was thrashing wildly. A few moments later, as I watched, there was, just audible above the sound of howling wind and torrential rain, a sharp crack, and half the tree split away. Terrified (if I recall correctly, but probably) I scurried through the house, but there was no one there. I was home alone, and to an eight year old boy it seemed the world was ending. I scurried back beneath the pillows and the blankets and desperately hoped I would be safe.

An hour or so later, after my mum returned – she had been taking my dad to the railway station ten kilometres away – we set out to get me to school. We lived up a long dirt drive, and our progress was soon stopped by a fallen tree. As we got out of the car to see if we could clear our path another fierce crack sounded from behind us, and a large macrocarpa fell behind the car, trapping us. Clinging to swaying trees we made our way back up a path, up a steep hill, and back to the house. We were barely holding our own against the wind, barely able to open the door of the house. The wind screamed as the door was forced shut, and the house continued to shake for several hours.

The power was out, but as the morning wore on, the transistor radio brought reports of a ferry struggling at the entrance to Wellington Harbour. The day of course was April 10th, 1968, the ferry was the Wahine, and it was 54 years ago today. I got a day off school. Fifty-one people didn’t make it home that night, and two died subsequently from the trauma. A fifty fourth person died at home, killed by a sheet of flying corrugated iron.

Obviously, I tell the story because today is the anniversary of that day. Obviously too I tell it because it was a dramatic, almost apocalyptic moment in a child’s life. I was terrified. And perhaps that is the tenuous yet very real link with the events of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. There was no terror then, except perhaps in the heart of Jesus, who almost certainly knew, though not I think in a crystal ball-gazing kind of way, that things were turning to custard.

As  Dr Gillian Townsley reminded us in this week’s Gospel Conversations, Luke is careful to tell his version of the story in such a way that the central paradox remains: Jesus is in control of the very events that are conspiring to destroy him. Whether by pre-arrangement or by some sort of supernatural knowledge he knows the availability of a donkey. Deliberately it seems he emulates the triumphant entrance to their hometown of great warriors. But his donkey is not a majestic horse, the prisoners that he will take in his procession are invisible to the human eye – for few of us, especially those of us of European descent, will ever see or understand whatever it is that makes up the spiritual world. The crown he will soon wear is not a laurel wreath but a brutal crown of thorns.

From the beginning of Luke’s story the author has told us that things will be upside down: the mighty torn down, the humble uplifted. The religious leadership of Russian Orthodoxy might do well to remember that, as they champion their obscene hero’s attempt to ride to Kyiv and Odesa and Mariupol. Whatever the outcome of these bitter bloody weeks the contrast with the entry to Jerusalem could not be more stark, and to say otherwise is to defecate on the gospel.

Ironically the crowd who gathered around Jesus on this day were expecting a Putin, a Glorious Leader. Dear Leader in various shades, but a Putin or Kim Jong-un nevertheless. The lies of a leader who claims that he is liberating his nation from the threat of a neighbour that he deceitfully  labels “Nazified,” these are the cries of the demonic. For evil will take human form. In the form of powerful military leaders it often has, the more powerful the more corrupt. Putin’s march of shame joins that of his predecessor Stalin. It joins, ironically, that of Hitler, of Pinochet and Pol Pot, of Napoleon, of Nero, of a thousand other tyrants through time.

Today you and I are in the crowd expecting a triumphant hero who will impose justice and peace. Yet justice and peace grow only from love. The Second Person of the Trinity emptied himself, remember, of all but love. Jesus knows we will be amongst those who, disappointed, cry for his blood in just a few days’ time. Because we do that. Perhaps not dramatically, bawling “crucify him,” but subtly we will all, as Paul puts it, “fall short of the glory” of the one who empties himself and become one of us. We will all fall short of the standards of the one who, in Wesley wonderful words, empties himself of all but love. Gender aside, few of us will be with the powerless women as they wait, weep.

For only the powerless women, with no standing in society, wait at the cross, and later come back to embalm the body. Only the powerless. Luke doesn’t give us a glimpse of an empty tomb, but when a stranger breaks bread on the road to Emmaus the resurrection rumour begins to burst out, and the powerless begin to rumour hope in human darkness. Later we would distort that powerlessness into power, though I suggest in the twenty first century that obscene reversal is being torn from us, and soon we will be left only with whispers of love. But for now that’s another story.

As Mark’s telling of the gospel story makes clear over and over again, that story can only break out after God’s self-emptying love in Jesus has descended into the deepest hells of human existence, the Mariupols and Auschwitzes, the sinking ferries and advancing cancers. My temporary terror 54 years ago today was trivial, though disturbing enough at the time. But this week we are challenged to get just a glimpse of the journey from the adulation of the crowd to what Isaiah calls the pulling of the beard; a glimpse of the loneliness, the taunting, the physical and above all spiritual agony of the coming days of Jesus.

Because – and herein I offer a sneak preview – it is in the deepest and deeper than the deepest of darknesses that resurrection light will burst.