three fingers pointing

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, N^th OAMARU

EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (July 31^st) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Hosea 11: 1-11

Psalm 107: 1-9, 43

Colossians 3: 1-11

Luke 12: 13-21

 

 

Tucked away in a series of teachings about expectation and judgement Luke has Jesus throw in a conversation about wealth. Wealth!

A week ago I could talk breezily about Mercs and Porsches because you and I both know I’m never going to own one! Dreams are free, and critiques are cheap when fingers are pointed firmly, if only in satirical ways, at others. But as we all know, when we point at others three times as many fingers point back at ourselves. Now I’m not going totally to spill my guts here, but, hey, what are the three pointy fingers saying to me?

You know, things are tightening at the moment. Belts, that is. I’ve been feeling miserable, not only because Putin is acting like a prat, and plastic sludge is endless, and species are dying, (except Nepalese tigers I believe, and now people are complaining because there population is expanding again), and Mother Earth Papatuanuku is overheating.  But I like most of you – and let me know if you’re an exception – I’m feeling the pinch.

Feeling the pinch? What pinch? What am I feeling compared to the daily struggles of the those living in Eritrea, where crops have failed again? Madagascar, Somalia, Yemen … this list is terrifying enough before we even add countries where turmoil is escalating, governments tumbling, hope fading.

It was of course ever thus to some degree. Many of the countries struggling today were struggling yesterday. Images from Eritrea in the 1980s tore at the world’s soul. Other countries have suffered then, too: Bangladesh, Nigeria … on and on goes the list.

One outcome is compassion fatigue. What can I do? In my book on Revelation (he says modestly) I suggest that whatever else the day of judgement might be – and we toss judgement out of our faith at great peril – we of the global north will have much sorry saying to do: Neither the judgment images of the Book of Revelation, nor this Jesus encounter with a money-grasping man, nor the man in the story Jesus tells to him, allow us room to think we can saunter nonchalantly into whatever “heaven” is, whatever “eternity” is.[1]

Neither though are they entirely a thing of terror: the news of Jesus is good news, not horror. But we are challenged to look at ourselves. And sometimes when we fail to do that God does it for us, and expectations and even empires and civilizations crumble because we have failed Justice and Compassion 101. Welcome to the months since bugs escaped a Wuhan market: our stripping mother nature bare (“earth is a witch and we still burn her,” as Christy Moore powerful chants) is hurting all creation. At the very least we are experiencing payback time as nature, God’s agent, calls in some debts.

That too is to some extent unfair. God knows if those in an Eritrean camp right now have done less in a lifetime to damage the world and its ecology than I probably do, actively or passively, in a month of Global North lifestyle. And I say that even without owning a Porsche or a mansion, or, as, Dr Townsley  yet again reminded us, a da Vinci painting that sold in 2016 for $450 million dollars. That’s a lot of provisions for a lot of starving children. 

Earlier in the liturgy we undergo a small rite that reminds of our participation in sin, exploitation, lovelessness, all the attitudes and behaviours that run counter to Gospel. We hear a priest say that God forgives us. Yet I believe that there is still, in whatever judgement is, a need for further recognition of our wrongdoing. How many people could have eaten this past week if I had eaten less, used fewer commodities, burned up less power? Am I at least to some extent the man storing grain in his barn?

Are the ecological and economic collapses threatening God’s earth a foretaste of what the New Testament writers call the orgé, the wrath of God? And while today our news services remind us that the suffering is greater in Global South or Third World countries, if there is life beyond death, as this Jesus parable presumes, may I not be the one to whom the words “you fool” are directed? We have a doctrine of forgiveness, yes, but I think God may ask us to look deep into the eyes of those who are suffering before the final absolution is pronounced.

No one should like preaching in this way. I preach to myself. But right from the beginning, as Mary the Mother of Jesus proclaims her Magnificat, Luke has been warning us that the lenses of God’s judgement are not to be dismissed airily. There are strong hints in this passage about sharing – the man in the parable failed to share his wealth. Grain, as it happens, the likes of which Mr Putin’s obscene behaviour has almost stolen from the most desperate on earth. But I am not guiltless either: I fail to live up to the motto I tout, live simply, so others may simply live. We will find later in Luke’s writings, in the Book of Acts, that the early Christians – for a brief period – shared their goods in common, precisely so the naked could be clothed, the hungry fed, the widows given hope. We know form Paul’s letter to the Corinthians this idealism quickly died – yet in that death we stand roundly chastised. Chastised, but not, pray God, condemned. Not quite.

What can we do? Now, insanely, I water down my own argument. Perhaps as a preacher I too am afraid to look too deeply at myself. At the very least I am challenged to reassess the weight of my footsteps on the lives of others, the lives of those who come after us, the lives of those less fortunate than us in the present, the lives of species and of the planet itself.  I am challenged to tread lightly for creation, neighbours, whanau, the future.

I inevitably fail to live up to the harsh demands of my own musings when I'm confronted with the greedy man and his barn. When confronted too by the grasping man who provoked the parable in the first place. He like the two sons in the so-called prodigal son parable wanted to have his cake and eat it fast and furious. Jesus would have none of it.

I’m challenged yet again to look at my life, to wonder how better I can benefit the community around me, to thank God that in a universe where, as Paul puts it, all fall short of the glory of God, there is still forgiveness in the encounter with Jesus. One day.

Amen.

---

[1] See my Babylon’s Cap, 122, 125.

give us this day

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St ALBAN’S, KUROW

SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (July 24^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Hosea 1: 2-10

Psalm 85

Colossians 2: 6-15

Luke 11: 1-13

 

 

I have always wanted to be one of those super holy people that other people come to and plea, “come and lead our retreat. Teach us to pray.” In reality I’m just not that kind of person, so I guess it’s just not going to happen. 

Nor should it happen. In prayer I stutter. 

Something about Jesus made him a somewhat better target for someone wanting to learn about prayer. Not that, it seems, he really needed to pray. Being divine is a bit like that. Elsewhere, in John’s gospel account, we find Jesus saying that he was praying for what the army call “demonstration purposes only.” I remember a couple of Pentecostal pastors attempting to show me how to pray in so-called tongues, blithering away in something that they no doubt thought was the language of the angels Meanwhile I wondered what “demonstration purposes only” prayers really meant or sounded like to God. Then I fled.

Nevertheless “teach us to pray” was a reasonable demand to put to Jesus. They added of course a little blackmailing element, just pointing out that that’s what John the Baptist was doing for his disciples. Come on Jesus don't let your cuzz show you up! But the problem remains: what is prayer and how is it done? Whenever I find myself speaking about prayer I find a little monkey on my back. She;s  named Janis Joplin, and she snarls in her inimitable style, “Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” 

I'd prefer a Porsche, just in case God doesn't know that. or an E-type. 

I tend to think of prayer as learning to participate in the will and purpose of God. It’s doubtful that my having a Porsche or even a Merc is likely to be a priority in the heart of God, especially when a large proportion of my sisters and brothers on this planet have little hope of putting food on their table today. So forget the Porsche. Even if I told God that I really really would pick up hitchhikers in it and talk to them about Jesus I suspect God would see through me like crystal glass. I was picked up by a woman in Merc once. She told me she picked me up because she was a Christian. I'm not sure it showed. 

I don't think God is persuaded by self-centred prayers. Mercedes-Benz prayers of the Joplin genre are simply not prayer at all. Lord teach me to pray does not invite, as another song put it, “I know what I want and I want it now.” It’s not a prayer.

Still there are many times when you and I have prayed for loved ones, for a suffering world, for a more just and fair society, for rain, for no rain, for whatever our priority might be. Some seem to be deeply, deeply reasonable and loving requests to make of God. Lord protect my child. Lord heal my loved one.

There are there many times that my stumbling efforts at prayer seemed to be no more than launching thoughts into an empty universe. It is a lifetime task to come to terms with the suffering that sometimes seems inexplicable, unmanageable, a relentless pointer to an empty universe.

And yet there are those other times when I have prayed and found that I am engaged in a dialogue with love. Love does not always serve at my beck and call. Love asks me to have faith and battle on even, when the universe seems at its most cruel and empty. I think I can safely say, though I would not want to be put to the test, that even in the emptiest of times in my own life, a light has dawned in the darkness.

Perhaps there is a kind of catch to prayer. Often at the end of our liturgy we offer ourselves as a living sacrifice in the service of God. That relates somewhere, somehow to being prepared to be a part of the answer to my prayers. Asking that I may be forgiven entails asking that I may learn to forgive. Not yesterday, not today, probably not even tomorrow, but in the lifelong journey that God gives me, may I learn those harder lessons and so grow closer to Christ.

What then of praying for a hungry world? At the very least I suspect I need to learn, as the Roman Catholic Church put it for a while, to live simply so that others may simply live. I cannot redeem the suffering of whole nations, or even the underclass in my own nation. But I can learn to live so that my footprints are gentle on God’s earth and do not devour the life of others.

When it comes to prayer I can only muse. I am not great at it. I, you, we are all called to connect with God – both in the wise and formal prayers of liturgy, and in the little bullets of prayer as we recall individual matters, small and great, before the God of love.

So what do we say of prayers for Ukraine? I can only say that in the great catastrophes of human conflict I think prayer does play a part. So, sadly perhaps, does free will. Putin’s free will. The free will that people have, will to turn national identity into a God and to trample over the rights of others in the race to further their own perceived rights. It was ever thus, since Adam raised a Cain.

Innocent people will die because selfishness and greed continue to exist. None of us are immune from either fate. But for us the challenge is to continue to pray, as best we can, because to pray is to participate in the love of God, is to be transformed ourselves. In the purposes of God perhaps the breath of our prayer may be the beginnings of a wind of change, swords may be turned into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.

breathe in ... breathe out

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St MARTIN’S, DUNTROON

SIXTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (July 17^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Amos 8: 1-12

Psalm 52

Colossians 1: 15-28

Luke 10: 38-42

 

 

As Jesus and his followers trudge steadily towards Jerusalem they are out of step – cognitive dissonance some people like to call it. Perhaps I'll call it pedestrian disharmony. Except that Jesus knows this – as always I would want to emphasise I do not mean this in a clairvoyant or crystal ball gazing way. No, but he knows that those trudging with him just don't get it. That’s why in Mark’s gospel Jesus keeps telling people to shut up. Shhh. “Wait and see” my mother used to say back in the days one used to get pudding or dessert, and wanted to know what it was we were having. Wait and see.

Wait and see says Jesus, the Cross and Good Friday and the extent to which God’s redeeming love unstoppably reaches.

So, just after a brief powerful lesson that we explored last week, who is my neighbour, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we find Jesus breaking through social barriers; visiting women, making one of them a disciple, and finding more unneighbourliness. The nuisance reality of jobs that have to be done and conflicts that must be resolved breaks in to the idealism of Jesus’ words at the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan, “Go and do likewise.”

But it is not an either/or but a both/and. Martha, my friend Nicki Colledge  reminded us in this past week’s Gospel Conversation, Martha sneaks off to Jesus to get him to sort her sister out. Don’t triangulate, it was suggested, is one incidental message of our scene today. Elsewhere in the scriptures Jesus does not say if you have an issue with your brother or your sister go and drag someone else into it, go and triangulate, but go to them and in love sort out your differences. Mind you, no one ever said that was easy, and I doubt that I practise what I preach. Nevertheless, let’s at least start our understanding of Mary and Martha by acknowledging that whinging to a third party is not the Way of the Cross.

But other questions are at issue here.

We have Jesus breaking through social barriers – he was and is no respector of inappropriate protocols. He here dares to permit Mary the role she no doubt demanded without any great subtlety, that of “sitting at the feet,” a sort of shorthand description Of becoming a disciple. Later the Church silenced stroppy women the likes of Mary, but while Jesus was around in the flesh no one who knew him dared contradict his radical professions and enactments of justice and love. Fortunately the silencing of women only lasted around 1950 years or so. But in this scene we are given a brief glimpse of the reign of God, the justice and equality by which, as Paul puts it, there is neither Greek nor Jew, male or female.

Mary’s life-choice is a dangerous one. For a period – who knows how long? – she dares to shut out the noise and the busyness of the world around her. It is not an either/or, the dishes still needs doing, the income needs earning, the cattle lead drenching, the lawns need mowing. But Mary dares to be still, no radio, no television, no computer, or whatever the white noise of the first century had to offer in order to drown out reality and the voice of God. She faced just the stillness of being. Being with Jesus in the flesh of course, which is not technically available to us. But untechnically, or to put it a better way, mystically, it is. Through that Third Person of the Trinity, Jesus is with us, and we too can pause, in creation, in liturgy, in dreaming.

To do so we have to learn to internalise that wonderful prayer, “Lord, it is night.” In this case it need not be night. Lord it is stillness time. Time just to be. “What is done is done, what is not done is not done. Let it be.” We need to find Mary’s stillness, and thus find the stillness of God, the still point of the turning world, a turning cosmos beyond worlds.

In liturgy – and Martha’s dinner was liturgy – we can at its best find leverage by which we may tap into that stillness. As our church infrastructure collapses it may be our gift to White Noise Generations, our own included: be still. Oh Lord hear our prayer. Be still and know the one the author of Colossians describes as “first born, through whom all things.” be still and find the love and peace and justice of God. Be still. In that stillness find a moment to give thanks. Even amongst the hurly burly of dishes to be done, cattle to be drenched, livings to be earned.

Be still and become Christ to those to whom he sends us. Go out to exhale the Christ who we have inhaled in the silence the Christ who has renewed us

 

dancing with robbers

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St ALBAN’S, KUROW

FIFTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (July 10^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Amos 7:1-17

Psalm 82

Colossians 1: 1-14

Luke 10: 25-37

 

There is something deeply humbling – a reality check if you like – about preaching on the Jesus parable of the Good Samaritan in 2022. It’s an incredibly vivid parable, and as our Gospel Conversation panellists all noted, It is so vivid it basically needs no explanation in order to extract meaning.

But there is another dimension in 2022. When I began my ministry, it was a well-known parable, in some ways awkward to preach on precisely because it was so well known. What was there that was new to say? Vibrant young preachers – I was far too dry and boring – attempted to bring an old story to new birth by reinventing the characters and perhaps the ploy did no harm. I well remember one in which the Samaritan was a punk rocker. Each generation has found its Samaritans – those like us, but not quite. Just a little other to us. The good Muslim. The good transgender. The good Russian. The attempts tend to reveal our own prejudices.

Do I digress? Maybe. But if we were to take a quick survey down the Main Street (and I’m not brave enough) we would find, when we asked about the Good Samaritan, that while some would vaguely know the phrase, increasingly few would know the story or from where it came.

It is a vivid story. Few of us are arrogant enough to believe we are the Samaritan. Most of us recognise our propensity to walk by on the other side. Busy-ness, compassion fatigue, fear of attack on ourselves as we help a victim – a sort of modern day “Billy don’t be a hero” syndrome. We know we are the walkers, most of us, and those that don’t probably are.

Can the parable speak to us? We are painfully aware of our short-fallings. Yeah, yeah Jesus, we know.

There are a couple of warnings. The similarities between Jew and Samaritan are deep, deeper than the differences. We see that in John’s story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. So near, and yet so far. Put me in a room with a group of Sydney Evangelicals – there – my biases are showing – and all my resentments will emerge. Yet if a militant extremist from Mars were seeking to eradicate all Christians it is doubtful they would bother to differentiate between us.

There is the subtle issue, too, of the hard yards. I might give a busker or a beggar some loose change, but to my shame I have to admit that I would not put in the hard yards to see them restored to wholeness. I might pick up a hitchhiker covered in obvious prison tats, but I might wonder if I really wanted that person in my car, and quickly drive on. While I have from time to time worked with the disadvantaged including prisoners I have usually found excuses soon enough to run to the comfort and safety of my world. Here, Mr Beaten Up Guy, here’s 10 bucks for some Aspro and good luck for the walk home.

Beaten, stripped, left for dead. As Jesus told the story did he know that this description and worse would soon be his fate? Yet there is a bit of Jesus, no a lot of Jesus, of course, in that other character, the hated outsider, the Samaritan.

If we tell this story to strangers today we might decide that we and they are all alike the broken person in the gutter. For we live in a rather beaten up world, and we are beaten up with it. Beaten and beaters, for we are the robbers, the victim, the embarrassed passers-by. Not the Samaritan. We get that.

But we whisper a word of hope. Because none of us would be here today if we had not been touched by the one who gave us aid, medicine, a donkey, and the glorious hope of resurrection. Let us do likewise. We can whisper a word of hope in deed and word.

love, embodied

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU
FOURTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (July 2nd) 2022

 

  READINGS:

 

2 Kings 5: 3-14

Psalm 30
Galatians 6: 1-16
Luke 10: 1-11, 16-20-38

 

In his telling of the Jesus story Luke has a distinct pivot-point, which we have now passed, when Jesus stets his face resolutely towards Jerusalem, towards all that deep down he knows must await him there. His followers, still completely in a fog, turn and walk with him. Probably most, like Judas, expect that the overthrow of the corrupt Roman Empire is about to begin.

Jesus’ ministry is, in large part, one of forming his disciples, those who will take all that he is out into the world. Their vision, like ours, is imperfect. Is he a revolutionary? Certainly at this stage his revolutionary programme, if that is what it is, seems a little vague.

For he has spoken of suffering and dying. That in itself is not an unusual expectation for revolutionaries, though it would probably be preferable if their leader did not dwell on it quite so much. He has carried out acts of healing, quite remarkable ones, but tends to demand that his beneficiaries shut up. He’s fed hungry people, too, which is not a bad thing for a revolutionary leader to do, but seems not to have worried when the crowds instead of eating and joining the movement, have had their fill, and then sauntered away. Strange, this.

Unsettling.

 And he's done good things for some pretty undesirable people, really. Synagogue leaders, yes, but unclean women? Demon possessed outcasts? I mean, they’re hardly the sort to prioritise, are they? Though I suppose with all that strength, and provided the demons don’t come back, they could be pretty useful in close combat.

But at least he’s still talking about justice. The Romans – and the corrupt religious leadership in bed with them – they’ll be toppled. Won’t they? I mean isn’t that what justice is all about? And the peace once the overlords are conquered, that'll be alright, as long as they’re kept in their place.

Odd, though.

We have the benefit of 2000 years of hindsight. Sometimes the teachings of Jesus have been horrendously misapplied, to benefit the rich and powerful, the haves rather than the have-nots. But in recent decades that false power, those shibboleths have begun to crumble and we are being forced back to find not the revolutionary Jesus, in any political or much less military sense, but the one who is the embodiment of love, compassion, hope, above all, resurrection hope.

Love, compassion, hope (and more) but not from corridors of power. Not a theocracy whence Christians force their will on others. Just small, Jesus-like ways of touching those around us with love. Perhaps, and sometimes only perhaps, a little more scheduled then practising random acts of kindness, but that’s not a bad effort, either. Then slowly joining the dots of those random acts until they become habit.

By acting in small ways of love and neighbourliness in our society, the place God has called us to be, we can rumour love, can Rumer care in contrast to our often careless world. A book a couple of decades back spoke of being a “contrast society of Jesus.” That book title has picked up extra gravitas in the two decades since Alan Walker published it, because more and more we are being called to contrast not only with a care-less society, but a care-less society of followers of an ersatz or false Jesus. Constantly the media, of whom I am no enemy, remind us of the bigotry of those who claim the name of Jesus and falsely cry “Lord, Lord” as they peddle hatred and the disempowerment of women and the most vulnerable in society. Their Jesus is not mine, is not the Jesus of the gospels. They need our prayers.

We must do better, so help us God. In our passage from Luke we find the bemused followers of Jesus, genuine seekers after truth, sent out. The Greek, Dr Townsley reminded us in our Gospel Conversation for this week, is closer to “cast out” then merely “sent out.” It is as if God-in-Jesus has flung us into the world to discover how to serve God, how to experience God, and as it happens how to experience and advertise the joy that comes from knowing and being known by the God of Jesus Christ.

As part of that casting out we may be sent away from our comfort zones and challenged – but helped by the Spirit of God – to find God in new zones, unforeseen futures. That is happening to us anyway. Do not remember the former things, said Isaiah. Old certainties crumble and pass away. My litany of trials (those temptations or trials of the Lord’s Prayer) can be named once more: rising tides, stretched economies, mutating pandemics, and the most serious military conflict since two world wars – these are trials gnerated by humanity and through which he will always lead us.

These do not have the final word. However much it feels that way these trials are not the full stop at the end of human history. Our comfort zones are crumbling, old certainties are pushed aside (as Alex Prud’Homme put it). We are being as it were cast out with the seventy followers of Jesus. Yet we will be empowered to touch lives with Christ-light and Christ-love even as we stumble, along the paths that as yet seem hard to navigate. But we are not the navigators, and we will return to Jesus like the disciples with joy even if as yet we do not know what that return looks like.

On the way we are not alone. Our koinonia, our fellowship is one of our greatest gifts and should be one of our greatest advertisements. Not the rhetoric of hatred pedalled by too many in the name of Jesus – or perhaps we should say in the name of a false Jesus – but a rhetoric of love, of welcome, of embrace and fellowship “You obey the rule of Christ,” says Paul to the Galatians, “when you offer a helping hand.” We called into our simple lives simply to offer that hand of help to those God calls across our path. We are called to live simply so others may simply live. We are called to live, and by our living called to proclaim peace, justice, and hope, even in the darkest times. That is the unsettling journey that Jesus leads us on.

In undertaking that journey together and together with Christ we proclaim Christ’s reign until he comes again.