jesus wept

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St. Alban’s, Kurow

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 26^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

          

Ezekiel 37: 12-14

Psalm 95

Romans 8: 8-11

John 11: 1-45

 

It’s too easy after 2000 years of conditioning to forget that gods of the ancient world were not supposed to weep. It wasn’t that they were without emotion. They could be angry, jealous, biff a few thunderbolts around. But crying? That was beneath their pay scale. This was particularly so of any god who claimed to be Boss God.

It was just not the done thing. Real gods could not show anything that could be interpreted as weakness. This passage in John 11 breaks a whole heap of protocols. We have the God carrier, the God Man, the Lord himself weeping. But we have at least one other protocol broken too. As with the Samaritan woman, we find a strong woman daring to break expectations. It was incidentally one of the great innovations of feminist theology to recognise and affirm that sin for women, or perhaps for womankind, was not so much stroppiness but submission, token acquiescence to a dominant male narrative. 

I would leave that for another time, except insofar as in the past few weeks we have seen or referred to the incredible strength of the Samaritan woman who argues with Jesus, the Syrophoenician woman who argues with Jesus, the brave women who will carry the gospel message out into the world, despite their fear and marginalisation, on the first Easter morning, and now brave Martha who is willing, as we know from Luke’s gospel-account, to be recognised as a disciple, and is here willing to confront Jesus with her rage.

Martha an Mary alike overstep the boundaries of submission. They expresses their grief and her rage to a man in whose presence they would be expected by society to remain silent. He in turn is not afraid, to absorb like a lightning rod their grief.

Mary and Martha had no hope with their brother gone, so her desperation can come as no surprise. She already had the idea that Jesus had some kind of mastery over life and death greater than any human she could conceive of. Why now, she howled, were she and her sister to be left with nothing?

It is also one of the most poignant verses in the Bible. John is telling us something here that is critically important. Jesus wept. Decent gods even in the first century didn’t weep. They were not particularly interested in absorbing human pain. But something is getting turned upside down here.

Martha and Mary are trapped in that visceral grief which really knows no measurement. We humans have the capacity to feel deeply our losses – partner, parent, above all perhaps our children or our grandchildren – there are no words sufficient. This grief is what Jesus encounters in the bereaved sisters. Traditional gods of the first century remained unmoved by such a scene, our silly human problem not theirs. Jesus wept. But his tears are not the final word.

Jesus calls Lazarus out of death. I don’t know what that means. The gospel writer is at pains to demonstrate that the situation was pretty unusual, that human decomposition was reversed. Of course Mary, Martha and indeed Lazarus are one day going to have to experience this scene again in all its dimensions. One day we will too, and there are dimensions of it that we will have already experienced in our lives.

But there is a still greater extent of divine love which is yet to be revealed in John’s telling of the gospel. Soon God in Jesus, Godself, will enter that same experience of brokenness, desertion, even Godforsakenness, and death. We will too, though thanks be to God we are unlikely to feel the utter desertion, the utter Godforsakenness of the death of the crucified Messiah.

Technically the experience Lazarus undergoes is a remarkable resuscitation, not resurrection. He will undergo the dying journey, the death journey again. This experience that John relates, whether we see it as a metaphor or, as I am happy naively to prefer, as a literal if unique event, This scene reveals only a foretaste of the absolute and unparalleled depths to which God in Christ will journey in order to bring resurrection light and life to human experience. Those themes of light and life have been reverberating through John’s gospel telling from the very beginning, those famous first eighteen verses. Shortly in the events of Holy Week and Easter we will read not just the deadness of Lazarus and the brokenness of Mary and Martha but the absolute hell depths of every curtailed life and every crippling grief. And though it is beyond words, it is there that a greater light and life will break out, and the weeping women will experience not only the reversal of Lazarus’ life and death but the beyond words restoration and resurrection of all life.

It is to that life and life we are invited each day.

imprenetrable darkness: meet inextinguishable light

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St. Martin’s, Duntroon

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 19^th) 2023

 

READINGS:

1 Samuel 16: 1b, 6-7, 10-13a

Psalm 95

Ephesians   5: 8-14

John 9: 1, 6-9, 13-17, 34-38

 

According to my flash new watch, which came I might add as a freebie, I am afraid of the dark. Now in my day – I’m not sure when that was or maybe will be – but in my day a watch was designed to tell us the time. The time appears on my watch to be a quite minor and unimportant function. However it does tell me my pulse rate, and I know that it is completely wrong when it attempts to tell me that my pulse rate soars disturbingly on the long dark section, about 17 minutes, of my pre-dawn morning walk. It tries to tell me that during that 17 minute section my predawn pulse reaches the same heights as it does on some of the steeper sections of my walk. The 12% gradients in fact, though I have to admit that I made that bit up because working out a gradient is way beyond my pay scale mathematically speaking. But the bit about the pulse is absolute truth, er, more or less.

Now I know that this new watch is spouting total nonsense, because I’m a big tough bloke, and a big tough bloke does not harbour secret fears. So of course my watch is wrong when on the flat bits of my walk it tells me that for 17 minutes my pulse, my pulse which normally rests around the mid-80s as I saunter along in the daylight, soars to the levels that it reaches on a reasonably steep hill, and hovers taunting me from the low one hundreds. I think the reality is that my watch knows that I am really very brave but wanted to provide me with a sermon illustration about humanity’s instinctive relationship with the darkness, formed back in the times when we were dwelling in forests and caves surrounded by tigers and bears. It, the watch that is, just wanted to remind me of those times, and of course I wasn’t scared at all because I’m tough and brave and modern.

Though I must admit I remember with some distress the dark, creaky dormitories and rattling sash windows of my preteens prep boarding school. I’m told one or two of my friends found those a little creepy. Not me of course. Although I am glad that I didn't have an irritating watch that measured my pulse and told me lies.

There is as some of you will know a prayer in our prayer book, in the late evening compline service, that draws a link between the darkness of the coming night and the darkness of the world and indeed of our own lives. Perhaps I’d be fibbing if I did not confess to a few darkness fears, which of course I don’t experience on my predawn walks as the shadows dance and loom and leer and I hear footfalls when no one follows me. 

But I’ll confess to some more serious fears nurtured by the images that I often mention, beamed into us on our internet news feeds and old fashioned television news services. Fears of global warming, of toxic sludge, of exterminated species, and of what French GP cum novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline called, somewhat poetically, “the insidious cancer cell even now crawling through the pathways of our body.” Except he used less polite terms.

For the mediaeval monks night was preparation for death, and each dawn was a celebration of resurrection. Earlier still the church fathers and mothers found in the rites of Lent a minidrama, an enactment of the slow human journey from birth to death to rebirth and resurrection. They knew that lifelong journey towards the light to be a journey towards the inextinguishable light of resurrection. They saw that resurrection light, the light that according to the author of the biblical book that we call Revelation, that resurrection light that shines on the coming City of God with such penetrating clarity that that city has no need of any other light. They saw that resurrection light pre-enacted in the experience of the blind man who encountered Jesus as he waited, sightless, by the side of the road. They saw in the anointing of that man by Jesus, anointing with dirt and saliva. They saw in that scene both an echo of God’s own creation of human beings from the dust of the earth and an echo of the rites of anointing at baptism that marked our entrance into the coming eternal New Heavens and Earth.

And so this passage came to be read at the more or less midpoint of Lent, reminding us and those who were preparing for baptism that the light of Christ penetrates and overcomes all darkness of human experience just as John, the author of the Fourth Gospel foreshadowed in his opening 18 verses.

The message for us is that this man is brought from blindness to sight, from darkness to light, that same journey on which we are called by the patient voice of God. The invitation that to us is to trust God in the darkness of an uncertain world around us, the uncertainties of our own life and the life of our communities, and to surrender our fears and any other darknesses of our life, to the searing and inextinguishable light of the risen Christ, the Lamb who is the light of the world.

AMEN.

fesity bloody women!

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (March 5^th) 2023

 

 READINGS:

 

           

Exodus 17: 1-7

Psalm 95

Romans 5: 1-5, 11

John 4: 5-42

 

 

Firstly let it be said that I think it is ambitious at the best of times to expect listeners to get their heads around John’s tightly packed, tightly constructed biblical passages. Each scene is a deep lesson in faith and in life, and some of the longer scenes, like that of our gospel reading today, could sustain several weeks’ unpacking in a university lecture format. I have six minutes. Or so. So for a start let’s park the other readings. They too are worthy of deep digging, but not today.

What is John telling us? To use the interpretive keys favoured by the diocese at the moment, what is weird, what is wonderful, what is a third W that I can’t recall but I’ll call it what is what? 

Or maybe just what is going on, what is Jesus even doing?  John flags this clearly: “Jews do not share things in common with a Samaritan.” No contact, see? Nada. 

This is a pretty fearsome woman – we’ll come back to that in a moment – and she knows that by customary law this is pretty much her well. A self-respecting Jewish man would back off. Not ask for a drink from her billy can out of her territorial well. Certainly a holy man, who may or may not be claiming to be some sort of messiah. Actually a decent self-respecting Messiah should get out of here 

… or she should, maybe? Something has to give. 

But she’s nothing if not stubborn. “Mate,” she would say, if she were Australian; “Bro,” perhaps, if  kiwi. Though that’s a bit more of a bloke thing. “Get your own water. From your own well.”

Irresistible force: meet unstoppable object. In moments Jesus is treating her with the deepest respect. She is worthy of theological argument. They engage, parry, seemingly enjoy. As we think of Afghan women being denied an education, or American women being denied life choices around their own bodies, we find Jesus inviting this woman to present a case on equal terms. And she does.

I suggested she is pretty fearsome. There’s a funny thing, here. Alone, I think, amongst the co-conversationalists of Jesus, this woman hears the claim “I am he.” I am God. 

It’s a reverberating moment though complacency makes us miss it. When this to us nameless woman starts to refer to the expected Messiah he cuts across her dialogue with unstoppable words: “I am he.” And, more than that, in echoing the great self-referencing of the God of the Hebrews, he effectively says, in Yoda terms, “God I am … I am God.” 

There are according to scholars, seven “I am” sayings in John’s gospel account, whereby Jesus of Nazareth claims to be an aspect of God. Bread of Life, Light of the World, Resurrection and Life, and so on. Yet here, in a risqué conversation, alone with, effectively, an enemy woman, he makes the first and forgotten “I Am” claim: “I am Messiah.”

Alone with a stroppy woman. No wonder Christianity majored in silencing women for the best part of twenty-one centuries. We silenced this nameless woman by portraying her as a loose woman, a whore, and a whole heap of other derogatory allusions. Forget that: she is a strong woman, an intellectual, and absolutely nowhere is it suggested she is somehow morally vapid. Married many times in a society where a woman was property like a cattle dog or a used car, this woman has been handed from husband to husband as, basically, breeding stock. And amidst all that she has nurtured a fierce intellect, and dares to challenge on equal grounds a male stranger at a well.

I have a fantasy. We know from the end of Mark that it was women who first dared to tell out the terrifying good news that the tomb was empty, the clutch of death mysteriously defeated. I don’t even know what that means. They did. We know they had stayed with Jesus when the men had fled. Mary, mother of Jesus, a Mary or two more, the woman with the sensuous hair, perhaps that wonderful feisty Syrophoenician woman who dared to argue with Jesus about the crumbs of salvation – perhaps this woman too – were those who gathered silently at the tomb, then fled, terrified, then overjoyed at the resurrection news. And blurted it out against all odds.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think women are perfect. Nor do I think this woman is more important than the Christ. Sorry. But women – most of you are women in case we hadn’t noticed – are no more imperfect than men, and on this day a woman dares to argue with God, as Abram once had, and prevails. 

Weird, wonderful – and the what? The what is a what are we going to do about following in her footsteps, telling out the mysteries of the God who enters every human soul and redeems us with irresistible – (in a good way) – irresistible love?

 

psychedelic breezes?

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU, SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (March 5th) 2023

READINGS:

Genesis 12: 1-4a

Psalm 121

Romans 4: 1-5, 13-17

Matthew 17: 1-9

The Transfiguration is one of those surreal moments in which we, and for that matter the gospel writers, really cannot conceive or convey what is going on. I have been known to refer to them as “sacred mushroom moments” but of course I wouldn't do that here!

That said I admit that I am a lover of the psychedelic 60s. There is much that is beyond telling, and that era went down its own majestic rabbit holes of exploring the wildness of the human mind. Turn on, tune in, drop out, in Timothy Leary’s famous mantra of that decade, is a mantra that it is undoubtedly a good thing I came along too late to learn. I was too young to indulge in the psychedelic breezes that were blowing then. Yet in all seriousness they were the desperate attempts by a counterculture to fine meaning, love, joy, in life where society seemed to offer none. 

Perhaps I digress. I am not here or anywhere advocating psychedelic or hallucinogenic substances. I am saying however that there is much that the words of human conversation cannot convey, and the psychedelic poets of the 60s and the inspired writers of sacred scripture found themselves trapped in the same morass as they tried to find ways to express the inexpressible.

For this Transfiguration scene, common to Luke, Mark, and Matthew in their telling of the Jesus story, is telling us something, but it is something beyond words. It is prefiguring that other beyond-words sequence of scenes that began with the event no human eye could witness, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on that first inexplicable Easter morning. I don’t know what happened on that Day, or, rather, I don’t know how it happened. But I know the frightened few became the bearers of resurrection hope, hope, justice, righteousness and life-laying-down-love from the moment that they learned that the man of Nazareth had shattered the cords of death.

And this was all prefigured, in its lesser way, in our surreal scene of Transfiguration. But why? Why are we being told about Peter, James and John and their encounter that was beyond words, their encounter with indescribable holiness on a mountain top, shortly before the terrible suffering and execution of their friend and leader?

I suspect if there is to be one central takeaway from this surreal scene it is simply that Peter, James and John, and of course Jesus, came down from their mountaintop experience. They came down with a new instruction which they heard, as they understood, directly in the voice of God. “Listen.” 

Soon they were to encounter that greater moment, the resurrection, which takes place after those protracted scenes in which we see revealed the extraordinary pains that divine love undergoes to bring about hope for humanity. With the suffering and death of God behind him, Jesus is prepared to add to that message “listen,” to add to that message the new command, “go, tell.”

It is worth noting what the disciples were not permitted to do at the time of the Transfiguration. They were not permitted to remain fossilised, memorialising nostalgically some moments in their past, like burnt out rock stars or sports men or women recalling their long-gone finest hour. They are told to listen, and later, after seeing the extremes of God’s love they are told to proclaim. To proclaim that love even to the ends of the earth and the end of time.

The sequence is critical. Listen. Pause, reflect, listen again if you like, for that is what Lent gives us a chance to do. And only then are we sufficiently renewed in faith to proclaim hope to the world.