on celestial nosh-ups

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

TWENTY SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August 28^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 2: 4-13

Psalm 81:10-16

Hebrews 13: 1-8, 15-16

Luke 14: 1, 7-14

 

It’s a strange thing about preaching, week after week, as I have the immeasurable privilege of doing, that too often we find ourselves accentuating the negative.

I think of the many sermons I have delivered or heard that emphasise the too little, the degree to which for example we fall short – that phrase from Paul’s letters to the Galatians – fall short of the glory, the expectations, the holiness of God.  And we do. But since that is a given – after all that is the meaning of “all” – let’s park it somewhere else.

Because every now and again if not in the underfelt to every scene of his teachings, we find Jesus simply saying, admittedly in first century terminology, “get over it.”

I mean, he means it in the nicest possible way. You may recall there is a saying that has become popular in recent years, when people are feeling sorry for themselves, “Go to Bunnings (or, least this be seen as free advertising, to Mitre 10), buy some timber, build a bridge, and get over it.”

But what if we find in the parable today not words of condemnation because we are arrogant and claim the best seats for ourselves, but, addressed to us, the instruction to move up higher, because we have wallowed for too long in the belief that we are miserable, unworthy, privileged and a shopping list of other adjectives that remind us that we are all together just what we probably know we are, not quite good enough to hang out with the likes of God.

In other words, what if we find that it is you and me, despite all our failings, to whom Jesus addresses those words, “Come, my friend, sit with me.” I suspect most of us would look over our shoulder to see who he’s really talking to. But there is no one there. The gentle beckoning of our host is to us. “Come, my friend, sit with me.”

Or, if I may return for a moment to my shopping expedition, what if we find that we have no need to go to the local hardware, because it is in fact Jesus who says, “Come on my friend, I’ve been to Bunnings or Mitre 10 – wherever – and bought some timber, built a bridge, and I’ve even carried you over it.”

Like the tenth leper who remembers to pop back and say “ta” to Jesus when he was cleansed with nine of his mates, it is probably a nice thing if we remember to say “ta” to God. But that’s what we’re doing. That’s Eucharist. A sophisticated way of saying, “Ta, God.” For lots. And what a privilege it is. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or fancy, or anything more than a genuine feeling of gratitude for giving us access to the creator of all that is, has been, will be, even though sometimes the journey has its wobbles. Sometimes bad ones. But: hope. 

Because Luke carefully situates this story between a scene in which a man with oedema is healed and a story in which the undeserving on the highways and byways are brought in from the streets to share a fancy nosh up in a flash house. Yes we might from time to time be reminded that we consuming more than our share of the earth’s resources, and be encouraged to do a little better, but that’s not the end of the story. 

In the first century world oedema or dropsy automatically symbolised greed. As it happens we see something similar in our own century with the sad prevalence of body shaming in various forms. But let’s not dwell on the negative. The first century had no better science then to believe that oedema was a sign of indulgence. Yet even then, Jesus, limiting himself to the worldview of his incarnation, simply reached out and transformed the man’s life. He had a habit of doing that, for the deserving and the undeserving alike. God is like that. The sun shines on the just and the unjust alike.

And in the parable that follows our passage we will find that a whole lot of not necessarily glamorous people are invited to the heavenly hoopla. It is kind of comforting, really.

The two banquet stories tell us that the undeserving, the not good enough, you and I have an invitation to sit at the banquet of Christ. It seems to me pretty good news, good enough to encourage me along the journey. Beyound comprehension, sure, but a lot of things are (build a bridge).

Our task is just to let it be, to say over and again, yes Lord, I believe. Or even yes Lord I kind of believe, or even yes Lord I wish I could believe but I don’t really get it and it’s nice to think some people do. There’ll be a lot of people surprised to find themselves enjoying what scholars call the eschatological banquet, but what I prefer to call the heavenly nosh up. If we imagine that by meeting a whole heap of prerequisites we have earned our place in God’s love, then we have a bit of re-thinking to do.

Even that’s not a fatal flaw. God is patient. In the meantime though it’s great if we can simply open ourselves up to the mad zaniness of a God who creates the heavens and the earth and you and me and loves us recklessly even to the extent of incarnation and crucifixion and inviting the outsiders to the party. If we can recall the mad zaniness of the one who invites the broken and undeserving, even us, to encounter mad irrepressible joy of relationship with God then giving thanks and joining the party is a pretty good response.

 

becoming fully alive (with help)

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

TWENTY FIRST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August 21^st) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 1: 4-10

Psalm 71:1-6

Hebrews 12: 18-29

Luke 13: 10-17

 

It was a fascinating adventure in the Gospel Conversation this past week, as I navigated a path between an emphasis on the demonic world of Satan and his minions and the personal and sociological dimensions of the encounter between Jesus and a horrendously crippled woman.

Let us not forget that for eighteen years this woman – unnamed as so many women are in the patriarchal world of the first century – has seen very little but the ground in front of her. The sheer physical pain, and emotional and psychological humiliation of her life is beyond words. Jesus, moved as he is so often in his ministry – moved to compassion, moved to the very viscera of his being, initiates a healing that is physical, spiritual, psychological, and even in a sense sociological.

Would that we could do likewise. I think of figures like the incomparable Fred Hollows – atheist yes dare I say it bearer of Christ – who likewise transformed lives, releasing them from physical, psychological, and spiritual demons. There are demons in society far removed from the stereotypical realm of beasties under the bed emphasised by so many in Christian circles. To say this is not to deny the existence of that which is beyond our post-Enlightenment and sometimes arrogant worldview, but nor is it to focus on the sensational and inexplicable that is dramatically over emphasised by some.

The woman of this story is never given a name. She is one of the massive majority of humankind, the majority of which are women, who slipped through history unmentioned or unnamed. Yet we glimpse both her suffering and her redemption, I say again, physical, spiritual, all-dimensional, as we hear this Jesus story. Jesus initiates heaven for this woman.

Jesus is a little less visible in our world than he was for the three brief years of his public ministry in first century Palestine. We, however inadequate, are called to be his voice and hands and feet. Dare we even ask how we might touch lives in our community? I might add that whenever I say this in a sermon I am almost inevitably spun into an encounter with someone in need.

I often fail, fleeing from their need. I remember with shame to this day the time I tiptoed past a person sleeping in the cold on the doorstep of my church. I tiptoed past him in the dark, frightened perhaps by his form in the shadows, but I later relented. I made a cup of tea and would have given it to him, but he was gone. I had let him down, and I had let God down. The demons of the world at least for a time maintained the upper hand in his existence. As it happens there is a happy end to the story of his life so far but I can in no way claim credit for helping him on the path to restoration. For me the lesson remains that I walked by on the other side.

Jesus in our vignette today, this glimpse of his ministry, becomes the Good Samaritan that I for one so often have not become.

In the end it is too rare that I or perhaps we serve successfully as the voice or hands or feet of Jesus Christ. Yet we can but ask that sometimes – just sometimes – we may touch a life with Christlove. We will never be a Fred Hollows, that atheist Christ-bearer, or a Desmond Tutu, that Christian Christ-bearer, but we can but ask that our lives may touch and transform the life of another human being this day, this week, this lifetime. I suspect you and I won't change the world, and God knows it needs changing, but we may be for some person the touch of the love of God, if we ask God to let us so be.

 “The glory of God is a human being fully alive” said Irenaeus in the second century. May we touch lives so that those lives may become signs of the glory of God. And may we likewise be touched.

Amen.

 

the scream of a rose?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Martin's, Duntroon

TWENTIETH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August 14^th) 2022

 

READINGS:

 

Isaiah 5: 1-7

Psalm 80: 1-3, 8-18

Hebrews 11: 29 – 12: 2

Luke 12: 49-56

 

 

I’ve probably not confessed to you previously that I count myself, and know some who would agree with my counting, among the word’s most neurotic people.

Nor have I, I suspect mentioned either to you or as far as I know to any other congregation in nearly 40 years of preaching that I was, like many young boys of my generation, a fan of James Bond. I went along the terribly English trajectory, from Famous Five to Biggles to Bond – and on to Alistair McLean. Then, mercifully I finally grew up and became a student of literature, including the post-colonial writings that were (rightly) most scathing about my childhood fodder. And Salman Rushdie too, God be with him. But perhaps it was Fleming’s Bond that did me the most psychological damage. I refer not to 007’s dreadfully chauvinistic and utilitarian attitudes to women, but to a traumatic scene in Moonraker.

Let me explain.

I don’t want to be sexist but I’m going to be, accidentally of course, for those of you who grew up without the reading advantages of a Y-Chromosome, reading perhaps Anne of Green Gables or whatever. Let me introduce you to Gala Brand, probably the only Bond Girl to escape his toxic masculinity (see, I am writing in the 2020s). Ms Brand resists, escapes Bond’s narcissistic overtures. But I’m not going to read the escape passage in a sermon. It’s online!

So no … here's Bond and Brand presumably having together sipped a tequila on the rocks, shaken not stirred. Gala apparently picks something called a bee orchid, ophrys apifera, the British orchid that famously imitates a lady bee and traps a Mr Bee. A honey trap with a difference.

“You wouldn’t do that if you knew that flowers scream when they are picked,” said Bond.

Gala looked at him. “What do you mean?” she asked, suspecting a joke.

“Didn’t you know?” He smiled at her reaction. “There’s an Indian called Professor Bhose, who’s written a treatise on the nervous system of flowers. He measured their reaction to pain. He even recorded the scream of a rose being picked. It must be one of the most heartrending sounds in the world. I heard something like it as you picked that flower.”

Ever since reading that passage when I was about 12 I have been traumatised at the thought of picking of cutting flowers. Ask Anne!

Fleming’s scene was actually based on the research of a nineteenth century Indian botanist, but that need not detain us. My story – and hopefully soon if not already the link to our Jesus scene will be apparent – is all about me. For now.

I loathe picking flowers.

But it is a fine thing to have a wife. Ever so patiently Anne has set about rewriting my clearly tortured psyche. She has not even charged therapist fees – just mandated that occasionally I overcome my phobia and reach with secateurs for a rose.

Unlike James Bond I so far have never heard a scream.

None of which is my point. Because this is a Jesus story, not about me after all. For centuries, long before Ian Fleming, we have read too many Jesus-sayings with the scream of a rose reverberating in our spiritual ears. For too long we have heard the scenes about branches cut off and thrown into the fire as if we were hearing about Fleming’s mythical rose.

An angry God. Not the God revealed on the cross and in the life of Jesus, the God of Jesus Christ who in him reaches out to bring hope to the disadvantaged, the mourning, the bereaved and the suffering.

So not the scream of the rose, as it is picked or the branch and cast into the fires. Are the fires the Jesus message? Or should we hear instead the relief of the plant, relief as the dead weight of decaying branches is taken from its metaphorical shoulders and cast aside?

Fire in the hands of story-teller Luke is far more often about purging – from which word, incidentally, we get “purgatory – and refining than about some eternal torture. Later  we will see flames of Pentecostal empowerment. Friendly flames. God’s flames.  

So what if we realise that the branches cast into the fire are no more than the toenails that we trim and sweep with relief into a rubbish bin? What if we realize that the fires of most of the images used by Jesus are not the punitive fires of eternal torment, a pretty useless form of punishment as no good comes of it for anyone. No: isntead the purging, cleansing fires of divine love, of healing, of restoration to the full and eternal potential with which you and I and all human beings were breathed into existence in the first place?

When Jesus wishes the fires were already kindled, he does so not out of some sneering malice, but because Jesus, the embodiment of divine love, longs for the final and eternal healing. He longs for the moment when all of us, and all who we love and pray for, and all from whom we are divided by our faith-decisions, yes, but sometimes by less virtuous elements too, have been relieved of the burdens and the scar tissues of our lives, and are eternally reunited in the inextinguishable blaze of divine love and glory.

 

no chicken, no ostrich

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

NINETEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August 7^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Isaiah 1: 1, 10-20

Psalm 50: 1-8, 22-23

Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16

Luke 12: 32-40

 

 (WITH APOLOGIES FOR THE 20+ TYPOS IN THE FIRST POSTING OF THIS!)

If I could underscore a key takeaway from our gospel reading it would be the opening words of this section of the addresses from Jesus. “My friends, do not be afraid.” There are though a couple of problems in saying this. One is that humankind cannot bear very much reality. Psychologists remind us of the degree to which we block out of the consciousness dimensions of our existence thoughts that are too overbearing … philosophers in fact will often speak of angst.

How do I understand angst? It is in reality no more than a German word meaning “anxiety,” that same root word that has been peppered through our Jesus sayings for the last several weeks. My friends, says Jesus, do not be anxious. And yet surely it's utterly human to be so. For the many of us who have children and grandchildren, what sort of a world are we leaving behind? And while every generation has doubtless voiced this question there are for our generation some particularly severe indicators. My weekly mantra of rising tides, plastic sludge, shaky economics, and as French author Céline once almost put it, the cancer that is climbing through our – and he named a vulnerable part of the human body – even now.

So yeah, we could be anxious. But the anxiety that leads us to act like possums in the headlights is on the whole pretty useless. Frozen between fight and flight is utterly unproductive. And as fight and flight are probably equally impossible we are left frozen unless we receive outside help. For some that will be the motivational push of friends around us sharing a common concern, a common anxiety, and generating enough corporate energy to begin to bite the bullet. For us it can be that, but it can also be that unseen power, that dynamism of the one we might call the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of Pentecost. Probably we should hope that it is a both/and. The both of the Spirit of Jesus and the and of the motivational friendship of those with whom we mix our lives operate in tandem to help us address the future. And in that teamwork maybe there is something a bit like fight, fight the destructive forces at work on our planet, fight the larceny, the theft of a future for our children and our grandchildren. Most of us, it is true, prefer to be lovers than fighters, but perhaps when we realised that the future is dire, we may feel the winds of God’s spirit filling us with new energy, new gospel energy.

That though is only half the story. The second problem in encountering this reading in 2022 is that we are probably not particularly anxious. We are better at blocking out anxiety then my last few statements would indicate. We have blotted thoughts of global implosion out of our consciousness altogether, except perhaps when some feisty floats a few crazy ideas. We tend not to think that we could be hit by a meteorite at any moment. We tend not to think that we are like goldfish in a blender. We put those thoughts aside because to harbour them is to invite stress levels that are unsustainable. Nevertheless the rates of depression and even suicide in our society suggest that the voices of gloom do break through our protection mechanisms from time to time. In whatever form anxiety takes there are ways, metaphorical or literal, in which we recognise that the Alpine fault might shift immanently, even if we off and immediately replace that thought with the comfort that in geological terms “immediate” can be a comfortingly long time.

If “immediate” is a rather flexible formula, then life is much better if we're not Chicken Licken. The sky probably won't fall on our head, as we subconsciously tell ourselves. Although occasionally the niggling voice of insurance companies whisper to us that no this property can't be insured any longer, or no, the current rate you or I are paying for insurance is simply unsustainable in the face of risk assessment. In that case perhaps Chicken Licken is more realistic than the infamous ostrich with its head buried deeply in the sand.

And no, ostriches don't do that.

But that's a digression. Or is it? Anne and I have often owned chickens whose fight or flight response is that glorious one of squatting carefully down on the ground, hoping that the swooping hawk won't see them. It is a forlorn hope, certainly for chickens, but even for ostriches when faced with a careering and hungry lioness. Even flight is better than squat.

But where does this Jesus saying about fright, about flight, about frozenness leave us? There are, it seems to me, one or two keys to take from this teaching of Jesus. In the first place Jesus does mandate readiness. The disaster readiness advocates are correct, for every household needs supplies for the onset of a crisis. In faith too we need supplies: supplies of grace as it were, supplies of those elements that Paul calls “fruit of the Spirit.” These are gained only by immersion in the disciplines of faith. if the master comes, suggests Jesus, we must be marked by love, the costly love born of discipline, by joy, the deep joy of knowing God in all circumstances, by kindness, by patience. To radiate these is not an accident but the results of deep spirit-work. Yet we can enlist the aid of the Spirit to nurture these fruit within us, by prayer, by exposure to scripture, by learning, as Paul put it, to give thanks in all circumstances. By these disciplines we can be transformed, sometimes with some little pain along the way, into the likeness of Christ.

But in the second place, though, while we can never be nonchalant about our faith and about the temporary nature, the fragile thread, of our existence and all humanity’s existence, we must not despair either. For in this Jesus-parable is an impossible note of grace. The abiding image of God in this parable is not of a punitive master, but, if we can generate some degree of readiness, of a master who does what most gods do not do. He kneels, as the Ghanaian hymn puts it, at the feet of his friends. No self-respecting God of the first century would do such a thing.

On the other hand no self-respecting God of any century would permit him or her self to be crucified.

Would they?