are we there yet?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

THIRTIETH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (October 23^rd) 2022

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Joel 2: 23-32

Psalm 65

2 Timothy 4: 6-8, 16-18

Luke 18: 9-14

 

 

As we scamper through the readings it would be negligent not to mention and grasp the wonderful hope-filled prophesy of Joel, who almost swims against the tide of the prophets. He dares to whisper the hope of a God who will love again, affirm again, set right again the recalcitrant people God had called to be his own.

In a world that is churning out an awful lot of darkness that might resemble the wrath of a grumpy God, handing humankind over to its own rather misguided devices, it’s encouraging to hear Joel’s words of hope. In Dante’s portrayal of Hell the words “abandon hope all ye who enter here” are emblazoned above the entrance. Joel reminds us that ours is a gospel of hope, not just in the cruisy times that we have enjoyed for much of our lives but in the heart-pulling times that have also always been a part of the human story.

Am I the only person who sometimes feels like giving up? 

Or, as Maria McKee put it, “God help me, am I the only one who ever felt this way?” And the answer is “no,” I'm not the only one.

And “yes,” God helps. 

I want to park Joel’s words of hope for a while, though. Because in the Jesus story we have what appears at first sight to be a clear contrast given to us by Luke, as Jesus observes and reflects on a spiritually arrogant Pharisee and a broken, guilt-ridden but penitent tax collector. It is a contrast between a religious hypocrite, perhaps, and a penitent sinner. In our minds we might picture the sequel to this vignette. Jesus welcomes the penitent to the fellowship of faith, while the Pharisee saunters away, ever so pleased with himself.

Where are we in this story? We have to be careful. Unless we wrongly believe the scriptures to have been dictated from on high into a Word document, perfect in every syllable, then we have a problem here. The Pharisees get bad press in the four gospel stories, but they were written some time after the events they depict. History suggests that the Pharisees were not all bad. Not even mostly bad. By the time the gospels were written Jews and Christians were trapped in mutual distrust – we might think of the distrust clergy are held in by much of society today, a distrust that grows deeper with every chilling revelation that emanates from Royal Commissions and their equivalent around the world.

Don’t get me wrong. Awful atrocities have been perpetrated by those in positions of power in Christian communities. So too have works of grace and love. We must remember that, just as there are Christians who hold the hands of the dying and whisper words of comfort in every age, so too the Pharisees were on the whole compassionate, God-serving believers. If you want to look for the bad guys of Jesus’ decade you might want to look at the Sadducees. They were the ones riding Harley Davidsons and flying Bombadiers or Gulfstreams in the name of corrupt, life-sapping religion.

It is particularly important that we remember this, because our Christian history has, with tragic implications, tended to write a false equation when we have said simply “Jews were and are corrupt,” and “aren’t we Christians good?” We forget the Jewishness of Jesus at great peril. We forget our own histories of distorted faith at great peril. Yet to say that, too, is not to invite slippage into the error of those Christians who believe the State of Israel can do no wrong,. We do not stand with those who danced on the graves of justice, moving at least on paper their embassies to Jerusalem. Such figures flew in the face of decency by trampling down the delicate sensitivities of all who find holiness in that troubled spot on earth, and did so to please a self-righteous religious right.

No political state should be confused with the people of God. Not Israel, not the USA, not Syria, not Burkina Faso. God disregards the lines we draw on maps. God regards the Image of God, bestowed on humans in creation, and marred each time we perpetrate hatred and injustice. 

And, fierce Anglican though I am, God disregards the subtle differences in the way we worship or the ways we protect the structures of our faith-based institutions. God, loathe though I am to admit it, is neither Israeli nor Anglican. God looks for integrity, high or low, left or right.

It is tempting to read this Jesus-scene and to judge and condemn the Pharisee. I am reminded again and again, and will be until I die, of the ecclesiastical gatekeeper who in a previous parish told a newcomer that they had come to the wrong place. Was it the colour of her skin, her tattoos, her youth, that made him decide she was not welcome? Did that gate-keeper later pray “thank God we do not let those people in here”?

Yet this Jesus-scene throws a still fiercer issue at me: are there times I do precisely that? Do we by our traditions turn away the too young, the too uneducated, the too non-European from our fellowship?

Am I the broken tax-collector or the Pharisee?

At best I suspect the answer is both. And surely our life-task is to ensure that all that is holier-than-thou, all that leads us to look down on others, is stripped from us, and that we become safe people who know our own need for divine grace, and simultaneously see the hand of God on the lives of all around us.

Perhaps it’s a long bow, but was that was what the prophet Joel was looking towards, too. To a time when his people would be a people of welcome and embrace, of justice and love, whose sign above the door written in actions not words, was “experience hope (and love, and welcome …) all ye who enter here.” Are we there yet?

steadfast love ... despite all

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

TWENTY SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (October 2^nd) 2022

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Lamentation 1: 1-6

Psalm 137

2 Timothy 1: 1-14

Luke 17: 5-10

 

As Luke approaches the end of Jesus’ resolute journey to Jerusalem and inevitable execution, he knits together a pot pourri of parables and other Jesus sayings whose connexion is not always clear to us 2000 years later. Between last week, when Anne was here, and this week, we skip some telling sentences that may just have some words of warning to our present world. Let’s dwell with them for a moment.

The missing sentences are about causing others to sin, and about forgiveness. Perhaps they're considered too hot to handle in the cosy world in which the lectionary was drawn up for 2022. But times have changed to such an extent that it is even harder to pretend that ours is a cruisy and cosy existence. For since February when President Putin put into action his demonic brain explosion we have found it even harder than before to live with our heads in the sand. That said, when we hear tell of Putin’s sending still more able bodied men to face and inflict terror and destruction in the east of Ukraine It may be worth remembering the Jesus saying that we were supposed to admit, a troubling saying that tells us that where we have caused sin, caused people to sin, judgement awaits around unexpected corners.

And in our cosy corner of the world it is easy to consider that this has no application to us. We are neither being sent nor sending others to a military frontline to inflict and experience devastation. But it is worth pausing for a moment. Not for the first, nor for the last time in our lifetimes we are hearing of the atrocities that we call war crimes. The perpetrators of such evil must not be allowed to escape judgement, human or of course we dare to believe, divine.

The Nuremberg trials taught us that simple compliance with evil is no excuse for upping the ante and carrying out evil orders. God alone knows how we would respond if we were inflamed by racial and nationalistic hatreds, but that's not the issue. The issue is that any who have perpetrated evil must face judgement, human or divine, human and divine. Wars since Nuremberg have taught us again and again the humans are capable of perpetrating atrocities beyond belief, and there can and must be no excuse for such sub-animal behaviour. But greater still is the judgement that rests on the shoulders of those whose ego and nationalistic pride sends others to carry out their dirty work. Racial hatred and jealousies are no excuse for perpetrating evil. But even since Nuremberg there has been reminder after reminder of the evil that can dwell in human souls. War crimes committed by Germans, Japanese, and perhaps we thought that was the end of the list, but since then by Rwandans, Serbians, and let us not forget British and American military, and now Russian soldiers and mercenaries, these reinforce the message that all human beings are capable of evil given the chance and the motivation. No claim that the devil made me do it, or my senior officers made me do it, or circumstances made it inevitable, will ever be an excuse in the eyes of divine or even credible human courts.

So much then for the Jesus sayings that were to be omitted this week. Perhaps it is some comfort that the primary perpetrators of evil, the likes of Pol Phot, Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić and now Vladimir Putin, face a judge more stern even than those of war tribunals, but the thought is for now small comfort to the widowed, the injured, or the dead of Ukraine.

Yet these are big pictures beyond our comprehension, and far away from us. The Jesus sayings in this section of Luke shift focus from judgement to forgiveness – the latter an inconceivably difficult concept in the face of such atrocity – and on to faith and duty. In the light of current international events these themes may after all be close to being too hot to handle. We are not qualified to speak of forgiveness and we may well be misconstrued if we speak of duty in a time of all too real military engagement (not we should add that there has never been in our lives a time without military engagement).

So where do these reflections leave us? We are on the whole unlikely to face the cataclysms being faced in Eastern Europe. This is one of those times when not individual passages but the whole sweep of scripture must be the key to facing God’s future. As it happens our reading from Lamentations reminds us that desolation and despair can all too readily fall on those who consider themselves to be the chosen of God, and may even be considered to be a tool of God’s wrath. To say this is to speak en masse, to speak collectively. God is not punishing the individuals on whom Putin’s obscene missiles fall any more than God is punishing the Hector’s dolphins swimming in their last desperate circles off the coasts of our country. In the beginning of the book we call Romans Paul makes it clear that God can hand us over to the implications of our existence and like the Three Musketeers we can find ourselves all for one and one for all. All have sinned, and to a large extent all wallow in the outcomes of human sin.

So where is there good news for us? I guess I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't believe it was there. The writers of scripture offer us no “beam me up Scotty” escape routes from the results of human sin. The witness of scripture however whispers something else. It whispers of the healing, redeeming hand of God as revealed in Christ, as made known by the Spirit reaching out to us. It whispers to us that the despair and desolation beamed into our homes by news services every day is not the final word. It whispers to us the news that the steadfast love of the Lord, as the author of Lamentation put it later in his poem, never ceases.