desperation rulz ok?

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

And St Martin’s, Duntroon

TWENTY FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (September 18^th) 2022

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 8: 18 – 9: 1

Psalm 79: 1-9

1 Timothy 2: 1-7

Luke 16: 1-13

 

Well here’s a thing. Every three years this little slice of Jesus-teaching comes up in our lectionary. It is one slice that can generate a few furrowed brows. It is, as my gospel conversationalists admitted during the week, a slice that has many of us choosing the Old Testament or epistle reading to preach on instead. Actually I looked back through my records and found that this Sunday three years ago I was preaching at All Saints’ Gladstone, and I did in fact preach on this difficult Jesus story. I spoke about the prickliness of some of the bearers of Christ truth, I talked about Greta Thunberg and mentioned Joan of Arc, Rosa Park, Malala Yousufzai, Rachel Carson, reminding myself and the parishioners there that God and God in Christ chooses unexpected people and unexpected stories to bear divine gospel truth.

Then I put that sermon away, because I have pledged never to preach sermons from the past. The world has changed too much, I have changed, and you are not All Saints’, Gladstone. But the point remains, God turns up in unexpected places and forms, and perhaps Greta Thunberg and Rachel Carson in particular are even more our prophets for today than they were three years ago.

But I won’t go back there, to that sermon. As Christ followers in the late first quarter of the 21st century we are – or should be – painfully aware not only of the vulnerability of our planet, but of the history of the church. For at least 1700 years our flawed human institution has revealed at least a tendency to produce from this Jesus moment not an icon of living for the benefits of others, but of learning simply from the corruption of the corrupt steward. That is not the takeaway of this passage. It is a sad thing if we allow ourselves to be better known for corruption and even predation than for the love that we can sing so glibly about when we sing that song “they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Will they? Our track record isn’t all that good.

So what do we have here? I suspect we have a glimpse of Jesus’ divine sense of humour. I suspect strangely we glimpse a hint of the value of social capital. Perhaps Jesus knew the saying of his philosophical forebear, Plato, when the ancient Greek observed that necessity is the mother of invention. The steward of this Jesus story is crippled by the sheer desperation of his circumstances. But he is smart enough to realise that he can reach out and touch the lives of others to their benefit. Who knows what were the complex motivations of a Greta Thunberg, a Joan of Arc, Rosa Park, Malala Yousufzai, Rachel Carson? Is there such a thing as pure altruism? Is Greta Thunberg somewhere in her angsty adolescent and ADHD driven worldview motivated by something other than pure altruism, pure love for her planet and its species? Who knows? Who knows if even a Rachel Carson wasn’t driven by something other than pure determination to save the planet that in the 1960s was slipping into the horrors of a silent spring brought about by the DDT that Carson spoke out against?

In the last ten days we have seen a powerful example of social capital, as much of the world, and not just the English speaking world or British Commonwealth, has mourned the death of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth of course hardly needed to purchase any social capital but we have seen that she gained it anyway by the sheer integrity of the 70 years in which she did her job.

Certainly I am not suggesting that Queen Elizabeth was corrupt. That was the specuiality of the steward of our Jesus story. I’m not sure that I want to allow the word corrupt to dwell in the same sentence as our former monarch’s name. I’ll let it rest there for illustration purposes only. But what we have seen in her life and death, and what we have seen in the lives and proclamations of those other prickly prophets that I mentioned in my All Saints’ Gladstone sermon three years ago, was the ability to bring benefit to the lives of others. It is, too, that that Jesus leads us in this strange and slightly comic parable. It is in the end an expansion of that other great parable that Luke alone records, the parable of the Good Samaritan. For in each of these stories a boundary is crossed, lives are touched, transformed even, and the love and resurrection hope that dwells in Jesus Christ is proclaimed.

Hopefully in a less corrupt way, and almost certainly in a less profound way than all the famous people I have mentioned, we too are called in our own small way to reach through the boundaries of silence and nonchalance and touch and warm the lives of those around us.

 

Thoughts Following the Death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

 

SERMON/REFLECTION GIVEN AT St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

TWENTY FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (September 21st) 2022

(Sunday following the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 4: 11-12, 22-28

Psalm 14

1 Timothy 1: 12-17

Luke 15: 1- 10

 

I am however ignoring the readings for this week

 

For all of us this is a week that will remain implanted in our memories. I operate usually with a hard and fast rule of not diverting attention from at least a sample of the lectionary readings on a Sunday. But flexibility too is a rule, and just occasionally current events overtake normality. Let me say too that I speak as a ridiculous combination of socialist and monarchist, which makes about as much sense as anything else that hall marks our strange dash from go to whoa.

“A life well lived.” “A lifelong promise kept.” “One of the most inspirational women this world will ever know.” These are the sorts of phrases that we have heard over and again, and justifiably so, these last 72 hours or so. Today we are conscious with citizens of all the countries that we call Common-wealth that a life has passed through ours, no matter how remotely, and that our lives have been the better for it.

For most of us in this place, whatever Queen Elizabeth represented, she alone has represented it. She has been the embodiment of dignity, devotion, and unwavering integrity, even through the darkest and shakiest days of her long reign.

As the Queen has become increasingly frail in the months since she farewelled the husband that she clearly loved we have known that this moment would inevitably come. If I may digress with a personal tale for a moment, some of you will know but I am the possessor of a 100 year old mother. I'm not sure that “possessor” is the technical term, but it will have to do. Throughout her life, since the dark days of World War Two, when the Princess Elizabeth, alongside her father, sought to inspire the confidence and hope of her people in Britain and to a less direct degree throughout the Commonwealth, my mother has looked to Elizabeth with admiration, even one might say “devotion.” The queen I should add was four years her junior, but there was no doubt that the older subject was inspired by the younger inspiration.

With some apprehension I checked on Friday morning to see if my mother, who I contact twice weekly by Zoom, was aware that her inspiration had died. “Well, of course,” said Mrs 100, “What do you expect? She was 96 you know.”

But that aside, and if we return at least loosely to the subject of gospel, if not our gospel or other readings for the day, one of the essential ingredients of the incarnation of God in Christ, God in Jesus the Christ, is the absolute correlation between the command, or what we call Word of God, and the outcome of that command, that Word. Be healed, says Jesus, and a person is healed. Be reconciled, and humanity is reconciled to its Creator.

In the events of the last few days, we have seen the closure of a life which has exemplified, I would dare to say almost to the maximum possible within those confines of being human but not divine, a life that has exemplified that same absolute integrity. If we dug beneath the surface of many of the words spoken these past three days or so they would point to Queen Elizabeth’s life as one spent to the greatest degree humanly possible in the embodiment of integrity.

I think one of the reasons we as a people are so deeply moved by the death of Queen Elizabeth is because, however much we knew it was coming, we were not ready for the closure of a life that so completely connected word and action, promise and implementation. We knew this end was coming, particularly since we saw a suddenly frail old woman, masked and in mourning clothes, lamenting the death of her eccentric but clearly beloved husband. In that moment not so very long ago we were reminded in a different way that royalty are deeply human.

To reflect in this way, and I might add so inadequately, on the life and death of Queen Elizabeth is not in any way to suggest that she was perfect. Were she to sit with us I’m sure she would be the first to assure us that she had many flaws. There was much criticism levelled at her at the time of the death of that noble-tragic figure, that human figure, the Princess of Wales. The Firm seemed for a while to be irreparably damaged, yet a phoenix rose from the ashes, and in the years since we have seen a new model of inspiration arise despite the flaws and the humanness of the principle actors.

Her Majesty would demur if she were to hear much of the praise that has been directed her way these past three days (though she may have approved the warm thoughts of Paddington Bear). I want to say now, in the context of liturgy, only that it seems to me she has thrown herself wilfully, constantly on the mercies of God, the strengthening, uplifting mercies of God, as she has sought to be a person living for others. She had some private life but woefully little, and she knew that would be the case from the moment at such a tender age when she promised to live in the service of her people.

In living out that promise she has modelled the central ingredients of faith, ensuring that she served God and her people not in her own strength but in the strength that God gave her. She sought to change with the changing world, if sometimes reluctantly, while retaining the essentials of her role. She threw herself again and again on the strength and the mercy of the God she knew was primarily her Master. She drew attention away from herself to the needs of her people, seeking always that help of God. Our lives are, thank God, the richer for it.

As it happens, I believe at least one part of her legacy is that our lives will be richer not only because she has in some strange way passed through them, but because she has formed and nurtured, sometimes in cauldrons of struggle, an heir in King Charles III who will continue to serve, to lead, and to inspire all who care to look his way.

So for now we simply give thanks for an inspirational life that is closed, a life of immeasurable integrity, that has passed through our lives, and for which our lives are all the richer. For now we can be deeply grateful for all the inspiration that Queen Elizabeth has been.

“May ‘flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’” said King Charles to his late mother in his first King’s Speech yesterday. To which I would add those beautiful words from the last rites, “May your portion this day be in peace, and your dwelling in the heavenly Jerusalem. Amen.”

on the road again

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

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

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 18: 1-11

Psalm 139: 1-6, 13-18

Philemon 1-21

Luke 14: 25-33

 

 

As you may be aware, Luke constructed a large section of his Jesus story around a loose travelogue. It begins towards the end of Luke 9, at verse 51, and more or less ends with that pivotal scene when he weeps over the city that, as a Jew, he loves beyond words.

That aspect of Luke’s story is not unlike many of the heroic sagas and moral tales of Luke’s time, and Luke would have been thoroughly aware of that. Naturally he believed that his is a tale not of entertainment but of life and death – in we might say an eternal context. Jesus will weep over the city he loves, enter it, be crucified there, and then the story will not end.

Although there’s also a sense in which the story bifurcates, splits in two. The Acts narrative goes on to tell of the work of the spirit in taking Jesus and his gospel to the ends of the earth and perhaps of time. We could say there is a hidden parallel narrative – and that takes us into the story of the risen, ascended Christ, together with the expectation that he will in some way return again to wind up human and cosmic history, and declare all things finished and all things made new.

In that eternal framework, for want of a better phrase, Luke tells us that the upside down vision that Mary had, and of which she sang at the time of the Annunciation, is finally fulfilled. Mary told us that the poor will be exalted and the mighty torn down, and, to borrow the words of a much later woman, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. But I’m getting ahead of Luke’s story.

More of that another time, perhaps. But in the midst of Luke’s travelogue this week we have Jesus using powerful, provocative, almost offensive words to overthrow at least symbolically the very basis of almost every society. Love me. Hate all else.

Jesus is not giving us here, a basis for fratricide or matricide or any other cide or form of family murder. He is using hyperbole, dramatic exaggeration, forcefully to drive home his point.

Eleventh century saint, Anselm of Canterbury, devised an argument for the existence of God. That argument needn’t detain us here, Though it has kept philosophers entertained for centuries, as they either approve or disprove of it. But Anselm gave us the wonderful phrase “That than which no greater can be conceived.” Or, as I used to say to primary school religion classes, “the biggest thing in your life.” Fishing? Rugby? Money, sex, power, love, horses, sunsets? Your mother, your father? the list goes on endlessly and meaninglessly, as Jesus hints provocatively.

For in a vastly different context Jesus is using a similar tool to that of Anselm. What is the biggest most precious thing in our lives? Parents, children, loved ones? They should be pretty big factors in our lives. Shrink them, says Jesus. It's a big ask.

He goes on to speak of instruments of death, the cross. He puts following him into the context of love that is greater than life, greater than the love of life itself. It’s a very very intentional decision, the decision to follow Jesus.

When I left Darwin some years ago, I drove, not for the first time, across that great red continent. As I pulled out of our driveway onto the main highway south, my GPS announced “For 1375 kilometres go straight on.” At the end of 1375 kilometres the electronic voice announced “At the roundabout take the second exit.” After taking that exit in Alice Springs she announced, “For 1234 kilometres continue straight on.”

It had a feeling of resolution even in an age of air conditioned comfort, as I let out the clutch and headed south. Yet that is minuscule compared to the risky journey that Jesus of Nazareth calls us to. On the other hand, he does give us an eternity of help along the way.