plaited faith

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S NORTH OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

Te Pouhere (June 19^th) 2022

 

 

Ko te Karaiti te pou herenga waka

Whakapaingia te Atua to tatou Kai-hanga

 

READINGS:

 

Isaiah 42: 10-20

2 Cor 5:14-19

John 15: 9-17

You won’t have cause to know this, but for two years before I moved into this diocese I had the privilege of being a part of, and one of the priests at, a small Māori hahi in South Napier, called Te Pou Herenga Waka o te Whakapono: the post that anchors the waka of faith. The linguists amongst you may notice the connection between the name of this Sunday, Te Pouhere, and the words of that congregation’s name, te pou herenga.

The hitching post, if you like, of faith, to which all Christ-faith communities must be tethered.

A week ago we explored something of the meaning of the Trinity, and I hope I conveyed at least to some extent the idea that to speak of the Trinity is to speak the language of love. There is the love God has for us, but also the community of perfect, inseparable love that is the impossible, interconnected community of Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit,  in whom we are called to live and act.

Yet that can be all terribly ethereal and out there. Not meaningless out there, but out beyond our understanding, no matter who we are.

For us there is the demand of applied love. The Trinity of love is applied in the invasion of our lives by Jesus, by the resurrection hope that he brings, by the Spirit who makes Jesus’ presence and love possible through space and time, even by the act of love that is God’s activity in creating us and sharing with us the immense unfathomable mysteries of creation.

But that is still “out there.” We are not called, as the cliché goes, to be so heavenly-minded that we are no earthly good.

We are called to express our love in the realities of being human, the realities of human experience, the realities of our chain of being. We are called to express this in the interconnection that is the body of Christ. See how Christians love each other. Within that body of Christ, too, we are called to love within our small faith communities, our congregations. In the wisdom of our province, we have been called to be intentional in expressing that love across the plaits of three tikanga.

How?

What does it mean?

Since I have accidentally stumbled into a role as an historian I inevitably emphasise history. What do we know about the history of our church community? But more importantly, what do we know of the history of relationships across our varied cultures?

It is no mistake that the wise women and men who drew up the lectionary have taken us to passages about union and love. The gospel passage takes us back to Jesus’ final instructions to his followers, and it is no accident that those instructions are all about love. Though it is also no accident that if we put today’s words about love into their context in John’s gospel-account, we find that Jesus makes clear that such love is possible only through deep connection with the Vine. Jesus had said earlier, and now he makes clear once more, that to be bearers of Christ-love we must be deeply grafted, grafted thought discipline, onto that Vine.

If we turn to Paul and read him correctly, we will find that the lens through which he sees all Christian behaviour is that of love. How well do we love? The famous Hymn to Love that we know as 1 Corinthians 13, the passage made known to a whole new generation back at the time of the death of Lady Diana Spencer, summarises the demands and the signs of love. Do we show them? Do I?

John makes clear that love is no chance thing. Over and again he uses the word “remain.” It is a word implying discipline, demanding discipline. To do so, to remain in Christ as Anglican Christians in Aotearoa we are called to look deeply at our relationship with our Māori and Pacifica sisters and brothers, to acknowledge and seek to redress the disadvantages across the decades that they have experienced, to affirm symbolically and actually oneness in Christ-love.

In historical terms it is worth remembering that it was Māori who reinvigorated Christianity across Aotearoa New Zealand, and especially here in the Deep South, after Marsden’s initial overtures faded. If we value our faith we need to harbour deep appreciation, and express that appreciation, more, that aroha, that love, as best we can. It is our task to acknowledge the resource inequities across our tikanga. It is our task to listen especially to the cries de cœur from our co-tikanga in their under-resourced state. It is our task to share resources, not dumping second hand cast-offs but offering of our best to our whanau in faith. It is out task to learn from the telogical voices of our co-tikanga. 

We must learn how to express and practice faith-love. To be immersed in the Vine that is Christ we must with discipline learn to listen, to love, and to act in solidarity with our Māori and Pacifica sisters and brothers. It is to that we are recalled each Te Pouhere Sunday – by the Spirit of God to renew with discipline our love, in and for the tethering post that is Christ.

bloody impossible doctrines of love!

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

TRINITY SUNDAY (June 12^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5: 1-5

John 16:12-15

Let’s start, unusually enough for me as one dwelling at the extreme edges of chaos, but let’s start from something like the beginning. If there is something that drives me bananas then it is the countless stream of Christians – mainly clergy I’m afraid – who reach the point where they decide that because they cannot understand or explain the Trinity then it is all nonsense, a barrier to church growth, and let's get rid of it.

As John Franklin said in our Gospel Conversations  this past week, to explain the road code to a three year old is a hopeless task, indeed a pointless task. As it happens I know, admire and obey the road code, at least most of the time, and that is enough without knowing the intricate reasons for its design. There are as it happens reasons why most countries in the world drive on the right and we of the once British Empire drive on the left, but that really doesn’t concern me, and so I leave it alone. As the much-covered Iris DeMent song goes, “Let the Mystery Be.” Perhaps the comparison’s not quite the right one for me and there will be others for you. I'm more or less happy to accept the workings of a  continuous variable transmission – though I confess it would not be my choice (give me a good old clutch pedal and gear stick any day) – but while the words make some sense to me the scientific constructions are way beyond me. The same will be said of photosynthesis or a myriad other things that make up my life or yours each day.

I’m lucky I guess, that I have no difficulty with the theology of Trinity. But nor do I want to explain this wonderful language of love, because like all language of love it collapses in a puff of inadequate logic. The readings we have today, and countless others we could have, are merely scratching towards the immeasurable mysteries of a Triune God.

So it is the language of love. It is the language of being loved by God and of loving God, of being known by God (as the great Psalm 139 puts it), and of knowing God at least in some miniscule way, and of wanting to know more of God. 

This is the God who inexplicably decides to create or generate or whatever a universe – or an infinity of universes perhaps – and does so. That same God breathes divine image into at least one species on at least one spinning orb in that infinite universe amngst infinite universes, allows us the freedom to run our own lives. Sometimes as we see in Ukraine  we do so with disastrous consequences through our own fault or at the mercy of the fault of others or of nature.

 But where those consequences are disastrous, and indeed always because life as we know it is finite, God enters into our experience in a moment of time – or perhaps I can say entered into our experience in a moment of history – to give us, if we accept it, a way to gain access to the eternities that we have lost in our finiteness, never had because finite, but which dwell just beyond our sight. God enters into our finite existence, into our too-human floundering, not remaining out there beyond the universes, but entering your existence and mine, entering the depths of being human and being mortal, and there births eternity. 

Despite us and for us, even though as yet we cannot get it intellectually.

But this beyond-comprehension God not only does not remain out beyond the edges of the universes, but does not enter into human experience just once 2000 years ago and leave us forlorn. This God enters into the very deepest depths of human experience, into the bitternesses of human despair, angst,  loneliness, boredom or what the French call ennui, enters into every human experience throughout space and time, even in little old North Otago. And when God enters into that experience at any time in space, there human beings who are open to God’s presence can be touched and transformed.

And through all that God is the wonderful Community of Being, and for that matter Community of Becoming, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – breathing love and hope that otherwise would not be available to us, breathing resurrection hope when otherwise there would just be a clanging echo chamber that a far-off-God or perhaps no-God left behind a millisecond after some immeasurably gigantic and inexplicable explosion billions of years ago.

Trinity? The language of love from and for the God who is and always is Creator and Creating, Redeemer and Redeeming, Life-giving and Renewing, Making and Flinging universes across infinities, and yet caring for a sparrow that falls and those dying in Severodonetsk, and even for you and for me.

Amen.

Come Holy Spirit

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S NORTH OAMARU

PENTECOST (June 5^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Acts 2: 1-21    

Psalm 104

Romans 8: 14-17

John 14: 8-17

If we were to ask a Muslim convert to Christianity to express the fundamental difference in his or her new relationship to the creator God, they would almost certainly point to the doctrine, and more importantly the experience of the Holy Spirit. This of course is inseparably connected to the doctrine of the Trinity, but we will explore the intricacies of that complex next week. For now let’s focus on the language of the Spirit, which is language of the heart rather than the mind, but is far from trivial for all that.

Who is she? What does she do – what is her job description as I often put it? And why am I calling her “she”? We will come to that last question in two ways, one of which I still put on hold for a little while.
But first let me sing you, or at least read you, a song. Perhaps you know it?

She sits like a bird, brooding on the waters,

hovering on the chaos of the world’s first day;

she sighs and she sings, mothering creation,

waiting to give birth to all the Word will say.

 

She wings over earth, resting where she wishes,

lighting close at hand or soaring through the skies;

she nests in the womb, welcoming each wonder,

nourishing potential hidden to our eyes.

 

She dances in fire, startling her spectators,

waking tongues of ecstasy where dumbness reigned;

She weans and inspires all whose hearts are open,

nor can she be captured, silenced or restrained.

 

For she is the Spirit, one with God in essence,

gifted by the Saviour in eternal love;

she is the key opening the scriptures,

enemy of apathy and heavenly dove.

John L. Bell and Graham Maule

The task of the Holy Spirit is to release the work of Jesus Christ through space and time. More than that, her task is to release the resurrected presence of Jesus Christ through space and time. Jesus Christ was, and through the Holy Spirit is, the enemy of injustice, including the injustice of apathy, but including too the injustices of loneliness, despair, emptiness: all those dark works of death, and even the injustice of death itself.

“Silence in the face of evil,” famously said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German martyr, “is evil itself. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

And let me say I stand as much as most of us do in the comfort zone churches, deeply challenged if not roundly condemned by the German martyr’s words.

But let's pause from that thought. So much idiocy has been proclaimed about the work of the Holy Spirit. In the early days of the charismatic movement she was indeed a powerful wind of change blowing through the fusty corridors of mainline Christianity. But she generally limits herself to our readiness to cooperate in her redeeming, sanctifying, holy-making work. “She weans and inspires all whose hearts are open,” says John Bell in his now famous hymn. But we can close our hearts not just by hardness, by fusty corridors, but by a fixation on that which is entertaining and exhilarating. Comfortable Christianity, with its expectation of the sensational, soon turned the experience of the Holy Spirit into a form of entertainment. “More power, Lord,” yelled the late John Wimber from a floodlit stage as he performed some act or other of entertainment dressed up as Christian ministry. 

So how do we tell where and when the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, for the terms are interchangeable, the Holy Spirit is at work?

The answer is to look back into the deep places of our texts, our sacred texts. Her task – and perhaps now I should explain that in Hebrew and Greek alike “spirit” is a feminine noun – her task is to make known the presence and the work of Christ throughout time and space. Does Jesus entertain? He reveals from time to time  perhaps a wry sense of humour but the luxury of idiocy not so much, or in reality, not at all. No. He drives forward in works of justice, drives forward in, as I have said here before, such a way that there is no dissonance between word and action, drives forward to counter loneliness, hypocrisy, hopelessness, untruth, and dullness, to name just some works of  the demonic. He drives forward both to proclaim and be present as the opposite of these darknesses in human experience, in our lives. The work of the Spirit is to fill our lives with fellowship, integrity, hope, truth, and holy exhilaration, the opposite of dark demons.

Today is the feast of Pentecost. We are called simply to immerse ourselves in the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, so that we can experience and spread justice and resurrection hope, the fullness of the resurrected presence of Christ, in our lives in our world, no matter what is going on around us. 

But we are not mere passive recipients of this gift of God. Our task is through discipline, prayer, worship, and fellowship to be co-creators of the holiness that God seeks to midwife in your life and mine and the world's. The strange truth of the Spirit, Truth that is so fundamentally trintarian, is that she works, if we let her, from within us: God in us.

Come Holy Spirit, renew us in the likeness of Jesus.