truth in the spaces between

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, GORE

SEVENTH SUNDAY of EASTER (May 29^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Acts 16: 16-34

Psalm 97

Revelation 22: 12-21

John 17: 20-26

 

The author of the Fourth Gospel is a creative writer of enormous talent. At the time he wrote, division into chapters and verses was over a millennium away, so he knew nothing of flags like “chapter 17” or the fact that he wrote 21 chapters. Nevertheless he used flags, alerting his audience to significant dimensions of the Jesus-story he was narrating. Flags like key words, locations, themes. And we need to ask questions of the text. Who was Jesus addressing in John 17? It’s no longer the disciples, but the Father. “Father, the hour has come” (John 17:1).

We do not need to be scholars to be inspired by the fourth gospel. Actually, the author of this work would be horrified if he thought that we thought that we were inspired by him. He hints that in his final sentence (John 21:25).  

So I should put this in a different way. We do not need to be scholars to be inspired by the Jesus we encounter in the pages we know as the Fourth Gospel, or “John.” We should never, incidentally, call it the “Gospel of John” or “John’s gospel,” not only because we don’t know who wrote it, but because whoever wrote it will always emphasize that it is the Gospel of Jesus. But I, too, often forget that.

Onwards, then.

The author of John provides tools to know the mind of Jesus more closely. He does so, so that as we break open the word, we explore the teachings of the one who John calls “Word.” Word with a capital W.

Well, in English we give this a capital W. The author didn’t:  the scriptures were written all-caps. But it is similarly helpful to note some of the little flags the author does fly along the way. In the beginning was the Word, the command of God, the action of God, embodied in the man Jesus. Even in the beginning, not just in the first century or now.

So when we dig into the scriptures we encounter and explore Jesus. The Good News of Jesus. And if we look at John 17 we find that Jesus is no longer talking to his disciples, or to us. We are seeing how he talks to God – we are seeing how he prays.  And, just to confuse matters further, while the Jehovah’s Witnesses are right to tell us (as they do) that the word “trinity” does not appear in the bible, they are wrong, because the biblical writers are bravely striving beyond the limitations of the language available to them. Striving to find words for what we later came to call Trinity. As we see Jesus pray, we are seeing the internal communications of the trinitarian godhead – in conversation, discourse, on our behalf. And it remains beyond our comprehension.

So what are we left with in our small passage in John? The longing of the Godhead, creator, redeemer, giver of life, is for our unity. This is very different – and those of you who viewed the Gospel Conversations  will have seen this – very different to uniformity. The armies of North Korea march in uniformity. The armies of God live with disagreement, finding both truth and life in the spaces between letters of our language, the silences between words of our disagreements.

Now, don’t go thinking I am good at practising what I preach. If a cause I am fighting for goes down in synod I sulk in a corner until about three minutes later when I forget what I was sulking for. Amnesia is a wondrous healer.

On the other hand it’s not the deep reconciliation that the Spirit of Christ demands of us and coaxes and coaches us to. The Christ who reaches out to his betrayers and deserters after the crucifixion was exercising the deep love that dwells at the heart of God. Such love, far removed from my airy amnesia, is available to us only through the deep workings of the Spirit.

In our passage Jesus prays for unity for those who follow after him – for us.  He flagged this back at John 11:42. It is a prayer uttered deep within the heart of the triune God, Father, Son, Spirit. It is a prayer not for the militaristic and ferociously rehearsed unity of North Korean or Russian soldiers. It is a prayer that we can be a cardiac people, a people who learn to exercise the costly cardiac love, visceral love that drives reconciliation with enemies, reconciliation far beyond the limits of our imagination.

The only aspect it has in common with goose-stepping militarism is that it is borne of deep discipline, deep surrender to the transforming work of God. The prayer of Jesus ends with the plea that the divine Spirit embodied in Jesus may be embodied in his church, his on-going and Spirit-filled body.

But we must be prepared to be the answer to that prayer, and that takes hard work of the sort that most of us fall short of (or do I speak only for me?). But we are not alone – the coming of the Paraclete is always a part of this prayer of Jesus: Holy Spirit, come to us.

But come to us not in showy exhibitionism of some sad parodies of gospel, but in the hard and prickly work of transformation.

Only then will we be the people that are known by our love, the demand that Jesus highlights at John 13:35. Only then will we see gospel transform lives around us. And we will be that only by the deep and hard work of allowing the Spirit of Pentecost to touch and transform the deepest recesses of our lives. But perhaps that’s next week’s story.

light in all darkness

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, WINTON

FIFTH SUNDAY of EASTER (May 15th) 2022

 READINGS:

Acts 11: 1-18

Psalm 148

Revelation 21: 1-6

John 13: 31-35

The more I encounter the gospels the more I am in awe of the remarkable authors, human like you and me, who so skilfully wove together the all but inexpressible Jesus story. I am as you would guess, not one for believing that these scriptures were dictated by an angel from on high, but believe they are the work of ordinary human beings, like you and me, stumbling on the journey that came to be known as the way of Jesus Christ. Ordinary human beings, but possessing, as the author of Psalm 45 puts it, with “the pen of a ready writer,” and enflamed by the inexpressible joy of the writer of Psalm 148. So write they did, with God-breathed skill.

The author of the fourth gospel was one such. His scenes are in some ways so carefully crafted that it does them violence to divide them into segments for lectionary-based liturgical reading. But few of us have the concentration or retention to absorb John’s nearly 19,000 words (in English) of Jesus-story. So we have to take slices. And in this slice – “pericope,” the scholars call these slices – we enter the narrative just after one of the most dramatic sentences of the New Testament. In Greek “ehn de nux,” it was dark. If we were directing a film we would use the technique known as fade, or even cut, to black. 

If we have been reading or listening to John we would know by this point that “light” is one of the author’s great themes in the first half of John’s gospel-story. By now we would have heard the word 19 times. Most powerfully, we hear it in the opening chapter, the Prologue:

Nothing was made without the Word, everything that was created received its life from him, and his life gave light to everyone. The light keeps shining in the dark, and the darkness has never put it out. God sent a man named John, who came to tell about the light and to lead all people to have faith. John wasn't that light. He came only to tell about the light. The true light that shines on everyone was coming into the world.

In Greek or in good English translations the word “light” appears seven times in those verses, out of a total nine times in John’s gospel-account. Yet when we pick up the story, we learn – or should have learned if we heard that previous verse – that it was dark. Not “night,” so much, but “dark.” We are tempted perhaps with Dylan Thomas to rage against the dying of the light, except that, while some fire in our bellies does no harm, John dared to tell us that the darkness cannot win, that Christlight is inextinguishable. No matter what happens.

Scholars often tell us that all that we need to hear in John’s gospel account is revealed in the Prologue, the first eighteen verses of Chapter One. And at John 1:5, we have our clue: “the light keeps shining in the dark, and the dark has not overcome it.” In 1 John this theme is accentuated even more, over and again.It was a universal experience of the first Christian writers: love and life and light win, even when it seems otherwise.

Now let me confess, I sometimes if not often find this hard to believe. As I watch news from Ukraine, or as I read of growing suicide statistics from the youth of our own country, or read of rising tides eating our foreshores or of the plastic sludge strangling our rivers and oceans, our awa and moana, of new viruses and a host of other threats, I wonder often if the darkness is overcoming the light, if not for us but for our descendants.

Some of that is undoubtedly because our news services are more effective, more potent than at any time in history. If we were alive at the time of the Black Death I suspect that may have been more powerfully terrifying even than the news that surrounds us today, certainly quarantined as we largely are in New Zealand. The Bubonic Plague – perhaps most chillingly portrayed in 14th century wood cuts – wiped out 33%, one in three, of the population of Europe. So far neither Putin nor Covid is as terrifying as that, and while anything could happen at any time in the history of humanity, let us hold to that, however apocalyptic things may seem right now. 

In any case things are far less apocalyptic for us so far than for fighters trapped in the Azovstal steelworks of Mariupol or those struggling for a meal on the streets of Sri Lanka or justice in Afghanistan. And even terror and death and the seeming absence of God do not overcome the light.

For says John, the darkness does not overcome the light. 

John (whoever, wherever he was) wasn’t writing in a comfortable armchair. Judas went out and it was dark, and the darkness did not, has not, will not overcome the light. Nor did the terrors by which early Christians were executed, like their Jewish siblings before and since them. “Now,” said Jesus, as darkness appeared to win, “is the moment, the hour, the eternity when the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him.” Not yesterday when all was light and rosy, the yesterday of our youth or the yesterday before Satan, as the scriptures put it, entered Judas. 

Let us remember that Jesus washed the feet of Judas even after he decided to betray his Master. He did so because love wins. Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. 

The glory of light shines and shimmers out, “like shook foil” as the poet Hopkins put it, and conquers all darkness. John recorded all this years later, because even after some decades of faith and persecution, the knowledge of the presence of the risen Christ, shining light into the deepest, impenetrable darkness and hope into deepest despair, was utterly and inescapably real.

May it be so for us and for all who we love and pray for.

Come on in ...

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

THIRD SUNDAY of EASTER (May 1^st) 2022

 

a sign in a narthex (church entrance)
that did not win the heart of the gatekeepers of a church

 

READINGS:

 

 

Acts 9: 36-43

Psalm 23

Revelation 7: 9-17

John 10: 22-30

 

 

In the Jewish Calendar the Festival of Dedication, Festival of Lights, or Hanukkah, is one of the great festivals of faith. In the Book of Maccabees we are told various stories of the rededication of the First Temple, and by amalgamation of a couple of them we find the events that were the reason for the festival that Jesus was attending in Jerusalem. The Jewish people looked back with joy on the reestablishment of their Temple after its desecration by the oppressing Seleucid forces. We might imagine and hope that one day the people of Ukraine will rejoice in events celebrating the overthrow of Russian invaders, celebrating the restoration of sites pulverised and bestialised by marauders. 

Jesus the observant Jew joined his people as they celebrated the eight day feast of a light - nine lights - that miraculously burned for eight days despite their oil running out. The feast as it happens is one still celebrated even by many non-observant Jews, a kind of national party time of great joy.

We’re possibly looking a bit too far here if we notice that this festival that Jesus attended was a festival of lights, and that John is adamant that Jesus himself is the inextinguishable light who comes into the world. Nothing would be too much to believe of John’s creative handling of the Jesus story so we should not discount the possibility. But something else is going on here, something important.

In the scene we have the Jews – unfortunate shorthand in many ways in John’s gospel but we’ll stick with it – the opponents of Jesus come with yet another cynical trap, rather more subtle than some. Obsequiously they ask Jesus to tell them who is – they are of course not in the least interested in who he is, but are determined to demonstrate that he is a fraud precisely because he does not fit their ideas of who he should be or of how God should reveal the self, the being of God. The enemies of Jesus have decided which box God belongs in, and nothing will shake them.

Surely we don’t do this? Yet I have been in a church in which a person was nearly turned away because of their race – fortunately she was too feisty to retreat. I have watched countless times as church spokespeople pronounce in subtle ways or blatant who is worthy to attend: abandon hope all ye whose sexuality differs to mine, whose literacy differs to mine, whose clothing differs to mine.  

Even the great atheist poet R. A. K. Mason was more willing to find Jesus in a tramp’s clothes, “his body doubled under the pack that sprawls untidily on his back,” more willing to welcome Jesus than are than such gate-keepers of Christianity have too often been.

The opponents of Jesus were to some extent more subtle than this. As Bishop Kelvin put it in our Gospel Conversations, “what theories and proposition shall we fit God into?” As one who can be a bit academicky I know only too well how dangerous that heresy can be. If you do not hold to my propositions of who and where God or God’s people should be and how they should behave, then may you be anathematized – cast out – to darkness and the gnashing of teeth! Pronouncements from an Anglican diocese across the Tasman that effectively anathematize children working to understand their sexuality, a precarious enough journey without pompous church pronouncements – are one such example of pharisaic sin.

For Jesus the proof of the pudding of love, of faith, of integrity, is action. John we might recall describes Jesus as “word” in the first place, with the implication that Jesus is the creative word of God, in which word and action are utterly superimposed, united. Let there be light and there is light. In the beginning was God who is word, and light and life and love and you and I came into being.

Is this rational? No. It will never be rational. The opponents of Jesus come looking for a logical, tidy, packageable Jesus-Messiah and they don’t get it. They mustn’t get it.  If Jesus is to be saviour and God and vulnerable and crucified, he will not be one size fits all, nor one size fits me. He will wriggle out of my restrictions, hang out with the people I don’t want him to hang out with. Hang out with them and redeem them. How annoying is that? Even when they don't wear designer labels. 

And so be it. Because at my best I might recognize that he hangs out with me and with you too, and sometimes me and you are not the easiest people to love, redeem, offer inextinguishable light to, either.

So I guess it wasn’t an accident that John tells us of a moment when Jesus turns up at a feast of inextinguishable light, was it?

 

TLBWY

Oh dear ... see what happens
when you welcome strangers to a church?