fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

KO TE KARAITI TE KINGI - CHRIST THE KING  

(November 20^th) 2022

Near Eucla, January 1998

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 23: 1-6

For psalm: Luke 1: 68-79

Colossians 1: 11-20

Luke 23: 33-43

 

 

There is a strange sense in the lectionary that introduces periods of incremental change in the themes of the readings that we journey through. It is as if we were meant to prepare ourselves gently for the larger changes around the corner.

As it happens, if you will excuse a digression for a moment, there's a couple of places in the geography of Australia where you drive through unofficial time zones that create a segue from one time zone to another. If you drive from Adelaide West to Perth you don't make the full 2½ hour time change at the border but drive through an unofficial region about 80 or 100 kilometres long around the minute settlement of Eucla, where your time is changed by three quarters of an hour. In reality it makes considerable business sense, as is even more apparent in the New South Wales town of Broken Hill which on the basis of population gravity locates itself in South Australian time. These are important subtleties when you pick up a phone or e-mail your nearest business contact who may legally share your time zone, but who in reality isn't out of bed yet. Of course if you're driving the reasonably significant distances across our big flat red western neighbour it doesn't matter quite so much.

So yeah, we are in a sort of transition zone here. We have leapt from Jesus journeying towards Jerusalem to not only his arrival there, but, omitting a few details about meals, arrests and torment, have leapt to his crucifixion. We saw the full process, of course, months ago in Holy Week, but now we are approaching the death of Jesus wearing a different pair of glasses. Surrounded by political upheaval in the world we are looking for leadership that is greater than, sounder than, more just and compassionate than, the dictatorships of a Putin or a Muhammed bin Salmin, or the chaotic narcissistic machinations of a leader-in-waiting of that powerful nation between Mexico and Canada.

So how is this shift in the church calendar, originally invented by Pope Pius XI, supposed to rumour good news? To answer that question we need to know that Pius in 1925 was doing all he could to counter the emerging tyranny of an Adolf Hitler, a Benito Mussolini, a Joseph Stalin, or, though he was still a year from infamy, a Francisco Franco. Pius XI was a brave and visionary man, who openly accused the Nazi government of sowing “fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church,” the same accusation we might make of Vladimir Putin, despite his snuggly relationship with leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. They must themselves stand alongside Putin before the stern judgement of God on the day of reckoning.

We know of course that they have always been tyrants, that the more things change the more they stay the same. It is often hard to proclaim a God of hope when tyrants prevail. Yet that is an eternal problem and in our Jewish and Christian heritage it reaches back at least to the beginnings of scripture. As it happens the story of Cain and Abel was a reasonably late Hebrew scripture, but it makes clear that there always will be as there always has been tyrants soaked in blood. Against all common sense we are called to believe that nevertheless God’s final word is one of light, not darkness, is “Yes” not “No.”

The kingship that we acknowledge and celebrate on this day is revealed as a polar opposite to the kingship that the tyrants of history have sought to establish. God is not a king of missiles, but as revealed in Christ is the King of Love. The hymn writer Henry Williams Baker put it beautifully when he interpreted Psalm 23: “the king of love my shepherd is.” The kingship revealed in Jesus Christ is compassion, love, justice, and it is of these graces that we are called to be bearers.

If we were to hold the entire church year together in our thoughts we would recognise the recurring theme that we can only be ambassadors of this king of love by opening again and again our hearts, minds, spirits to his redeeming, sustaining, edifying and transforming love. It is to that surrender to this king of love that we called day by day, Sunday by Sunday, and it is for that reason that it is such a fine and soaring note on which to end the church year.


My sermons will be conspicuuous by their absence for the next couple of weeks, as I swan around in the southern reaches of that vast flat western isle, acquainting myself with a few grandchildren / mokopuna born since Covid, and reaquainting myself with a few born before. Oh and a few daughters, too. And their partners. Bring it on!

light at dark tunnels' end

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

THIRTY-THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (November 13^th) 2022

 

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Isaiah 65:17-25

For psalm: Isaiah 12

2 Thessalonians 3: 6-13

Luke 21: 5-19

 

 

 

If you’ve been even loosely noticing the way in which Luke has constructed his version of the Jesus-story you will be well aware by now that much of the story revolves around a very intentional journey towards Jerusalem. While our Muslim friends have an equivalent in, for example the Hajj and its destination in Mecca, both as Christian people and as kiwis we have little of equivalence. Neither in term of national identity nor in the relationship between faith and place our religion do we have equivalent. Perhaps as we grow in our recognition of cross-cultural stories the centrality of Waitangi will develop a similar resonance – and for some the even more demanding pilgrimage to Anzac Cove, Anzac Koyu, has similar dimensions. But on the whole, yeah, nah. And for those of us of faith the location of God within in us has gazumped any particularly deep sense of a spirit of place, though we do I think mourn in our Anglican tradition if our places of worship are desecrated or deconsecrated.

But for Luke’s audience and indeed for Jesus the importance of Jerusalem was immeasurable. Jesus has reached the holy city a couple of passages back, we have seen him weep over the city; in Matthew’s gospel account particularly we will hear Jesus make warning about the “desolating sacrilege” first referred to in Daniel and much loved by the crystal-ball gazing scripture-twisters who fill the stages and hog the microphones of sensationalist churches. For us it is important to remember that when Jesus spoke the Second Jewish Temple was still intact, a wonder and a central element of both faith and national identity. By the time Luke recorded his words pretty much all that remained was destruction, the rubble of past glory and past hope. The safest of safe spaces, the happiest of happy-spaces was gone. I can think of few equivalents.

Yet, Luke notes, Jesus speaks words of hope in the midst of immeasurable darkness. Again there are few comparisons in our story. For indigenous peoples, including Māori, I think there is a realization that what social historians tend to call “contact” was, however inevitable, a watershed, a cataclysm that wrought irreversible change to the world of their ancestors, their tupuna. For the newer nations such as New Zealand in all its bi- and multi-cultural history there is so far no such moment. There have though been wars of horror and natural calamities, and of course for all of us there have been personal calamities, after which life could never be the same again. And in the midst of these Luke reminds us that Jesus spoke – and still speaks we might add – a contradictory word of hope. Stand tall, he says. Like the prophets before him he dares to speak of a different narrative: be not afraid. I am with you, says God, even to the ends of ages.

Not easy, of course, to believe. And part of Jesus’ command to stand tall is the command to continue to be active. We are not called to despair, for example, in the dance of global warming and possible global extinction (including our own extinction) but to be active in attempts to midwife a better future. Christians who snidely await the destruction of the earth in the expectation that they will be slickly whisked away to a better place are not standing in the footsteps of Jesus. We are called to be active and hope-filled to the last, and to be aided in that by the presence of God with us. And sometimes we will stumble. And the invisible Spirit will prod and nudge, if we let her, and the journey to our own New Jerusalem will go on. God meets us in our anxiety, and leads us on.

It's not magic. We need to do our part. To cling to the hopes that are made known to us in scripture. Indeed, as our bishop reminds us over and again, to pray, to read the bible, to be – using my own words – as Christ to those around us. We are called – with the help of God – to exercise intentional, spirit-filled love, justice and compassion. And we almost certainly will not see the real impact of our moments and our days, my well see, perhaps should see the closure of the temples of our faith and happy spaces of our lives, but that, says Jesus, that recorded Luke, is not the end of God’s great story.

Harp free zone

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

THIRTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (November 6^th) 2022

 

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Haggai 1:15b – 2:9

Psalm 98

2 Thessalonians 2: 1-5, 13-17

Luke 20: 27-38

 

On a couple of occasions I have had cause to mention that the bad press given to the Pharisees in the New Testament is not altogether fair. On the whole, I have suggested, the Pharisees were more akin to contemporary clergy in the mainstream churches, and for that matter synagogues, even mosques: they were people who believed in their God, and did their best to exercise compassion and love and to proclaim justice and hope in a world that seemed to lack an awful lot of those ingredients. A world that seemed to lack an awful lot of those ingredients but was by and large not going to look for them in the corridors of organized religion. Later, as the embryonic Christian community began to fall out with its Jewish neighbours, things turned a little toxic and the Pharisees began to get bad press. Bad press in some ways, I have suggested, that was similar to the ways in which professional religious representatives have been given bad press, on the basis of some very bad eggs amongst their colleagues who have rightly been exposed by investigations and commissions. We hope of course, or I hope we hope that clergy will learn from mistakes of the past, and that whatever emerges from the collapse of our institution will indeed proclaim love, justice, compassion, and resurrection hope.

But there appears to be little in the way of mitigating circumstances when it comes to the behaviour of the Sadducees. They ceased to be a problem by the time the New Testament was written. They were so deeply in bed with the corrupt Roman Empire that, following the destruction of the Second Temple, they simply melted away into their well-feathered if somewhat lonely nests. They were, incidentally, providers of the detestable work force of tax-collectors, exploiting the underlings amongst their own people, making their own wallets fat by means of any method available, and making all the more remarkable the fact that Jesus on at least two occasions invites one of them to join his rag-taggle scrum of followers – one named Zacchaeus, another named Matthew.

Their main failing as proclaimers of God was not so much their denial of resurrection – but their exploitation of the vulnerable. There are theologians today – I think of the redoubtable Lloyd Geering and the, in my opinion, less credible Jack Spong, who specialize in disproving, to their view, any personal hope-after-death narratives. I think they are wrong, and may be in for a pleasant surprise in whatever eternity turns out to be, but I do not think they are evil in the way predatory and/or parasitic clergy have been throughout history. Those who feather their nests with fleets of Harley Davidsons and hangars-full of Bombadiers, those who avoid taxes by claiming miniscule wages while living in palatial homes, those who destroy children by preying on them: those are with the Sadducees amongst the lowest levels of humanity. But again: let us not forget that Jesus’ love reached even to the tax-collectors Matthew and Zacchaeus, and awaited only their surrender.

That too is not to say that denial of resurrection hope is poor taste. I often find it hard to believe my six impossible things of faith, things like resurrection and eternal existence, before breakfast. But there are times we are called to suspend our disbelief. I happen to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, and in the hope of the New Heavens and Earth and Humanity and of you and me and those we love and lose, impossible though it sems to me. But even on dark days I would be sub-human to declare, for example, at the funeral of a still-born child that the only hope of reunion was some sort of rebirth in the nitrogen cycles of a dying planet. Not so. And Jesus did not mean that, either, when he said there would neither be marrying or giving in marriage n the hereafter that he called eternal life.

The Sadducees also represented the worst of religiosity in another way. Dipping often ill-gotten wealth, they ensured, like powerful slave-owners, that those under their spell had no hope of escape. Like drug lords, paedophiles, televangelists, domestic abusers and other models of corruption, even like some oppressive mainstream clergy of days I hope gone by, they kept their minions in place, kept their dependents dependent, kept the light of dawn from breaking. The Sadducees’ story of the woman owned by seven brothers is the story of a society in which women were property, alongside shares in Twitter and the spare house in the Caribbean. Yet ever the tragedy of her purported life was, arguably, marginally better than that of the women, then and now, left to die when society has no further use for them.

But let’s finally come to Jesus, as every sermon should. For it is into this world of darkness – which was ever thus – that Jesus came. Jesus came, and Jesus spoke, and there was in Jesus, as I’ve said before, no credibility gap between his word and his action. Jesus speaks of a God whose love and hope reaches beyond the darkest darkness – beyond Good Friday when hope dies – and into the brightest of benevolent light. He speaks of a love that transcends even the most mind- and body- and soul- blowing experiences of human love, some of which are, we know, pretty good.  When he speaks of “those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage” he is speaking not of a negative, not of some chaste and dull state sitting on a cloud playing a harp, but of all we can imagine that is life-enriching. That and immeasurably much more.

As I’ve mentioned (often) elsewhere, the author of the Book of Revelation speaks of that which is to come not as static tedium but of electrifying engagement and action: the very best of all we’ve known and so much more. Jesus speaks of the God “who will shake all the nations” – who is doing a pretty good job of that right now – and yet even, after the last fading shake of human and cosmic history, will be God of the living beyond our sight. Beyond our sight, that is, for now, until we too join the saints who see no longer through a darkened glass, until we join our forebears and say at last, “aha, so that’s how it is.”

And the Sadducees may be in for a surprise. For good or ill will be their choice. Though whether there can be ill in the patient and eternal heart of God is a question for another time.