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.