turn, turn, turn

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT (February 26^th) 2023

Take a u-turn, bro

 

 READINGS:

 

Genesis 2: 15-17, 3: 1-7

Psalm 32

Romans 5: 12-19

Matthew 4: 1-11

 

Firstly, let’s get over talking reptiles and tall mountains from which human beings can see the entire face of a globe. That's got to be a pretty tall mountain, and it never has, never will, never could exist. I failed physics at school, but even I can get that.

One of the greatest tragedies to befall Christianity, in some ways more devastating than the great waves of persecution that Christianity has experienced ever since the first Easter, has been the invention of fundamentalism. Literalist, or fundamentalist reading of the scriptures of Christianity was a late 19th century invention that was set in concrete in the first two decades of the 20th century. It has done irreparable damage.

If I had a job as the devil for a day, I would invent fundamentalism. It strips our texts of meaning, pushes Christian faith beyond the boundaries of intelligence in a bad way, and hamstrings the gospel.

I add the rider “in a bad way” because we must also admit that there are aspects of our faith that are beyond human intelligence. That in fact is not saying an awful lot. There are aspects of science that are beyond human intelligence even today. I suspect there always will be, I suspect there always must be, otherwise human beings will have committed the final unforgivable sin of turning themselves into gods.

I am no scientist. I not only failed physics, but I only scraped through general science at school certificate level. But when I hear on the news that scientists have discovered that the sources of energy expanding the universe since The Big Bang are moving more rapidly than scientists think they should, then I respond with a resounding “meh.” There is so much we do not, cannot know or understand. I can live with that.

The founders of fundamentalism were terrified that scientific exploration and, alongside it, intelligent interpretation of texts would destroy belief in such fundamental doctrines as the resurrection. I have news for them. Resurrection, and most especially the unique moment of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from a tomb in the Roman province of Palestine, is a bit like the speed of the universe, or for that matter the intricacy of the human brain or a single cell: it is a matter beyond our human limitation.

I can live with that, too.

So, terrified as they were by intelligent critical reading, a small group of American Protestants invented fundamentalism and in doing so did immeasurable damage to the credibility of Jewish and Christian and perhaps other faiths.

So instead of talking snakes, let’s think about wet paint. Am I the only human being who has touched the paint to see whether the sign is telling the truth? Or the infamous “keep off the grass” signs that are so much a part of British city life. Am I the only person who has resented, if not rebelled against a sign that may in fact be there for good reason?

Forget the snake, but recall what the story tells us. Most of us have a sneaking capacity to do the wrong thing, if only occasionally.

Forget the pinnacle of the temple, or the Very High Mountain, too. As we read through the holy texts we can learn what to read as symbolic, what to read as history – though with the proviso that history was very different in the ancient world to what history is today. Geography, genealogy … we need to learn to dialogue with one another and with the great and credible scholars, too. We need to interact with the pages of those who interpret ancient texts, with a lifetime of their scholarly effort.

We might for example notice that the Satan who interacts with Jesus in our quite surreal scene today is constantly telling him to play act, to turn the relationship with the author of creation into a self-serving gimmick. We don't need to look far to find distorters of Christianity who do just that today, filling the airwaves and the plush auditoriums of so-called churches with entertainment and false hope.

What then is our task? Few of us will spend a lifetime studying 1000, 2000, 3000 year old texts in ancient languages. As we journey through the texts we will find that they challenge us to check the authenticity of our own lives. We will, surprise, surprise, fall short of perfection, but are we striving to put and keep our lives in order? What in my life is a sham? What in my life is shameful? What in my life is opulence or greed, what in my life damages or destroys the lives of others?

And slowly with the help of the God who comes to us in the humble Carpenter of Nazareth, the one we call Lord in our prayers and hymns, slowly with his help we are called, stumblingly, imperfectly, to, as the Ash Wednesday service puts it, “turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.”

 

Amen.

this is your moment

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

SEVENTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (February 19^th) 2023

 

READINGS:

 

Leviticus 19: 1-2, 9-18

Psalm 119: 33-40

1 Corinthians 3: 10-11, 16-239

Matthew 5: 38-48

 

 

It fascinates and saddens me that we followers of Jesus, the radical teacher of grace, have spent so long making the doors of faith difficult to open. Jesus the compassionate and unjudgmental judge, who welcomed the outsider, is the wone Christians claim to follow. Yet the Christian community has spent so many centuries setting up new barriers, replicating those that Jesus, and his very different followers Matthew and Paul, each in their own way spent an adult lifetime trying to pull down. Like the scribes and the pharisees we have spent so much time erecting not the porous boundaries of Jesus’ mission, but obscene walls, rules and regulations that make it so difficult for the lost and lonely to find comfort.

And of course I generalize. But our track record isn’t brilliant.

If you heard my Gospel Conversations this past week you will have heard that message loud and clear: too often we are a community of exclusion, not embrace. You would have hear Peg Riley’s tears, as she alluded to occasions in her life when the Christian communities have sought to exclude her. You would have heard Damon Plimmer’s measured reflection emphasising that the Christ who said we are salt, are a “good enough people” as I put it last week, without trying to find airs and graces to better ourselves, and worse to better those who might put a toe in our doors.  You would have heard Anne van Gend rejoice in the hand of God acknowledge the hand of God in our often clumsy attempts , turning darkness into light in the lives of those we cross paths with in our daily rhythms and routines, even when we don’t feel we’ve done very well.

As we look at our struggling church and churches it is only natural to wonder where we lost our people, where we went, arguably, wrong and lost touch with society. Yet we as individuals and collectively have done our best to put a decent foot forward; imperfect though we are, says Damon Plimmer, we are God’s imperfect people.

No doubt at this stage in the life of our parish we are all terribly, painfully aware of the frailty of our existence. Where is God in this? This struggle, apparently a losing one, to keep our metaphorical doors open (because our literal doors closed years ago). Where is God when we’re tired?

Of course over the years we’ve made errors. We have through history turned people away sometimes violently. In more recent decades we have still, while not emulating the Spanish Inquisition, nevertheless turned people away for not being Anglican enough, clean enough, straight enough, musical enough, in one dreadful case that I will never forget, pakeha enough. Clergy in particular have paraded their biases and pretensions. Don't get me going on that!

Yet paradoxically there is a deeper sense in which God does say to you “well done good and faithful servant.” Against the odds in a post-Christian world you have dragged yourself out Sunday by Sunday, maybe other days too. You have cleaned, welcomed, sung, played, even prayed! Believe me, I have not been a particularly good at loving my enemies – and in my small and unimportant way I seem to make a few.

Yet the paradoxical message that we have missed so badly over the centuries is simple. You and I are who God has put here, on this day, in this lifetime, for God’s unseen purpose. Mistakes, dear God, yes. But again and again God says, “Come on, let us start again, let us try again.” And God says to us also, “you do not see whose lives you have touched, who's darknesses have been turned into a lighter place through your being there.

I do not know your moments, and you do not know mine. I’m not even sure if I know mine or you know yours. But I know, looking back, that there have been moments when my life has been touched by the ridiculous serendipity of God, and I believe that we too may have been instruments in touching the lives of others. The irony in today’s readings is that we pretty much fall short of the demands of them all. But let’s put the guilt away. In all our failings, and there will be a few, there is a deeper text … you are who God has chosen for this journey and this moment in cosmic and human history.

 

 

 

about integrity, I hope

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

SIXTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (February 12^th) 2023

 

READINGS:

 

Sirach 15: 15-20

Psalm 119: 1-8

1 Corinthians 3: 1-9

Matthew 5: 21-37

 

 

Having told us, for those of us who recall from last week, that Jesus has addressed us as what Bruno Bettleheim might call “Good Enough Bearers of Christ,” we find this week that he is heightening the performance bar somewhat. Not one of the 613 commandments of Torah, the Jewish Law, is to be abolished, Jesus states. I haven’t read them recently, but I fear I have broken a good few, some publicly known, some in the deep recesses of my own heart.

So year by year as I find myself find addressing this passage for example, while I know myself to be known as having failed its harsh demands. For I am what is referred to in legal gobbledegook as “a divorced person.” In some legalistic minds I am worse, for I happen to be a divorced and remarried person (as I hope you realise, since Anne is floating around my house). Such a heinous crime would in the Diocese of Sydney, and no doubt some other legalistic and grace-free bodies prohibit me Christ-sized grace, at least insofar as I would no longer be permitted to be a priest. Perhaps such legalism is correct, for I’m not sure that we want those who have spectacularly fallen in one way or another to be our spiritual leaders. Or perhaps we live by a faith of grace, a faith that holds to a doctrine of redemption and second chances – or dare I say it, not though I am planning to exploit it, subsequent chances too.

I don't really want to make this about me, but I am also duty bound for the remainder of my preaching life, I guess, to acknowledge that some years ago I was forced to lawyer up in a legal spat, when unjust charges were brought against me. I was able at least to observe the letter of the law by permitting that case to be brought before a church tribunal, rather than before the secular judges that the New Testament writer Paul bars conservative Christians from approaching. Yet I must acknowledge that my lawyer was a somewhat sceptical lapsed Presbyterian, and I suspect I could do little to prevent him from thinking that at least some Anglican Christians were neandertals hell-bent on observing not the spirit but the letter of Christ’s teaching.

I confess too, as I did some years ago before my Queensland outback congregation, that I have occasionally – rarely of course – allowed my gaze to rest appreciatively upon a female form for more than the seven seconds that the somewhat legalistic if magnificent St Aquinas taught was the maximum duration of lingering permitted.

So … how do we read a passage that seems to have Jesus condemning the very fibre of most humanness? I assume my lingering glances at Anne Hathaway are somehow less mortal a sin then Vladimir Putin’s decision to slaughter thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, but it doesn’t seem that way. It seems to be that Jesus – or at least Matthew’s telling of the story of Jesus – is adamant that the 613 commandments of Torah stand unrevoked. Burn, Godfrey. 

Does this not pit Jesus against Paul, who is equally adamant that Grace, not Torah-observance is the gateway to God’s eternities?? Mind you, Paul and James already at loggerheads before Matthew began telling the Jesus story, which perhaps offers some comfort when I find myself, as I often do, in a fracas with my fellow clergy and others. Grace. 

And suddenly I find myself with a key to open this harsh Jesus vignette, this series of unattainable prohibitions and aspirations.

At least one key is Matthew’s dogmatic assertion that, while Jesus does not abolish the Torah, he does fulfil it. To some extent that casts the onus back on those of us who believe we have been baptised into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Can I look this same Jesus squarely in the eye? Or do I plead as some rather dubious Christians, the likes of Jim and Tammy Bakker, that the devil made me do it, that I am forgiven, washed in the blood of the lamb, and therefore absolved of all sin and indeed all responsibility? 

I don't think so.

Sorry, Godfrey, because while I can play that game, that is not the game of immersion in the resurrecting and resurrection love of Jesus Christ. I cannot play games with God. I make mistakes. I sin. I set my bar lower than many. But I hope and pray I never pretend I am conning God. I hope and pray I have integrity even amongst my failings.

And isn’t that just it? Isn’t that the self Jesus called us to be, honest and open before him, despite our deepest faults.

Be salt.

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

FIFTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (February 5th) 2023

 

READINGS:

 

Isaiah 58: 1-9a  

Psalm 112: 1-9

1 Corinthians 2: 1-12

Matthew 5: 13-20

 

 

 

I don't think we concentrate enough on the occasional playfulness of Jesus in his teaching. Certainly today we have Isaiah reminding us of the serious nature of the human need for God, highlighting the selfishness that can cripple the human heart, both as individuals and as any collection of people. Be it a church group, an entire region of the church, an entire church nationally or internationally, we can get far too weighed down by our own self importance, far too obsessed with our teachings, our rites and ceremonies, and sadly our overdose of self- rather than divine righteousness.

Actually that's why Paul in the whole string of his letters to the rather stroppy Corinthian church emphasizes that he seeks to empty himself of ego, of self centeredness. He seeks to proclaim only the life, death, resurrection of his Lord and ours, Jesus Christ. Sometimes though he's a little bit too complex to deal with in a sermon, and perhaps we should journey through his thoughts in a series of Lenten studies a little further down the track. If anyone is interested? Let me know if that's the case.

But Jesus is often a playful teacher. His humour breaks through in ways that have been all but deadened through 2000 years of solemnity, the very same solemn self righteousness, self importance that I mentioned just before.

With deadened baggage it's sometimes hard to realise how Jesus plays with us when he puts to us the rhetorical question “If the salt has lost it saltiness how can it be made salty again?” Of course when we lose our way as we often do we might remember the first part of this Jesus saying, “You are the salt of the earth.” It is about us ... or of the impossibvility of being not-us.  We tend to hear this as the threat of an angry teacher, a big red mark in the margin of our lives, rather than as a playful reminder that actually we cannot cease to be what God has made of us. 

If God has made us salt then we are simply called to surrender to God. And Jesus says that's precuisely what God has done. Being Christians we turn that into a set of all but toxic rules, thou shalt not, rather than a warm invitation to behave, with the help of God who is forming us even now, behave as decent caring compassionate human beings made in the loving image of God. 

In the end, love. And love is love, as we have learned recently to say, and as those seeking to follow Jesus we might just add the joyful reminder that God is love, and perhaps even love is God - or at least the very best taste of God that we can receive.

So salt can't lose its saltiness because salt is salt just the same as love is love. And the absence of salt is unsalt,  just as the absence of love is unlove, or of course those other words like indifference and hate. And when Jesus speaks of light and of our being light, he is effectively saying the same thing, because light under let's say a saucepan is no longer light. It is just an extension of the darkness. And for as long as we seek to be light, to be bearers of love and hope, to be whisperers of words like "are you okay," then we will be light, and not the unlight hiding in a saucepan with its lid on.

And I'm not even going into righteousness, the third point of these three sayings of Jesus, except to say that as we open ourselves up to the compassionate love and justice of God, to God's gentle healing touch in all its forms, (and I might explain what I mean by that another time too), then we become channels of that righteousness. We, ourselves! Make me a channel of your peace, make me a channel of your righteousness, make me a channel of your love.

We can obliterate the signs of God in our lives but on the whole we know when we're doing that, when selfishness, lovelessness, greed and aggression become the hallmarks of our existence. Most of us aren't very bad people, and I think in the context of these Jesus sayings our challenge is simply to say help me this day to be salt, to be light, and to be compassionate and just to those we meet.

By that can we be the sign of God's reign on earth as it is in the heavens.