strangers on a road

 

SERMON PREACHED at St ANDREW’S, CROMWELL

and at St. COLUMBA’S, WANAKA           

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 23^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

Psalm 116: 1-4, 12-19

1 Peter 1:17-23

Luke 24:13-35

 

 

Some stories from the scriptures are so well known that were it not for protocols I would be tempted to say that you know the story, let’s move right along. I suspect I’m not allowed to do that, protocols forbid. Still: a) I am under strict instructions from your vicar to keep it short, and b) short is exactly what I want to do. So here’s a compromise. 

So basically let us believe for a moment that we’re hearing this story for the first time. First we could ask how the story sounds to Luke’s first, intended audience in the first century, then how it sounds to us,  his accidental audience, hearing it for the first time today.

I don’t know you well enough to encourage an interactive sermon on this occasion, but it would be lovely to hear your feedback sometime about these first impressions regained, as it were, from a too familiar story.

For me the clue is often taken from a wonderful literary scholar whose approach to works of literature was simply to say “if something strikes you as strange then it is probably designed to have you take a second look.” So, because we can’t really be interactive, I will just give you a couple of my responses based on that methodology.

Firstly, there’s nothing particularly surprising about a couple of travellers walking along a road. Twelve kilometres was not a particularly arduous walk in the first century, roughly the distance from my house to the CBD in Dunedin, a walk I take from time to time. Walking and talking are not particularly unusual or mutually exclusive activities, even for allegedly multi-task challenged males. Actually I happen to believe one of the walkers was female, but that’s another story.  Admittedly as an introvert I don’t encourage strangers to start talking to me as I walk, but it is one of those things that happens. I am reminded of the fellow passenger on a bus across outback Australia who once asked me, “is that an interesting book you’re reading?” I can think of few more depressing opening lines.

I do think there is a little embellishment, probably from the author Luke himself, when the travellers ask the stranger, with some surprise, whether he has not heard of the things going on in Jerusalem recently. I believe it’s a literary tool that Luke uses to add dramatic emphasis to the story, which you may remember, he was writing at least ostensibly for someone called Theophilus. Luke just wants to add some dramatic emphasis to his story.

The response of the stranger however is a little unusual, and it is unsurprising that later the travellers will speak of their hearts being on fire as he unpacked the story that they themselves had told. I kind of like it too when gaps in my knowledge I fleshed out by a vivid co-conversationalist.

Then, it is true, things become a little surreal. There is nothing particularly surprising about asking the traveller to stay for a meal. It is a little more surprising that he disappears in a puff of unreality leaving the travellers, Cleopas and possibly Mrs Cleopas, somewhat bewildered. Apart from anything else I think Luke is telling us that it is okay if somethings don’t fit into our minds.

More important is that the travellers’ eyes and ears have been suddenly opened in the breaking of bread and wine. Overwhelmed by the sense of the risen Christ and his presence in this simple rite, they rushed the twelve kilometres back to their friends to join in a fellowship of resurrection joy, and to acknowledge that the women who were after all the first witnesses to the impossible event, were right after all.

And that is pretty much where I would like to leave story except that, were I hearing this for the first time and deciding to make a movie or a stage play out of it, I would probably have those women roll their eyes meaningfully at the formerly sceptical followers of Jesus, who had refused to accept their testimony that divine love will conquer even the deepest darknesses if we only get it, if only we let it, and seek the power of God to help us be grasped by this new reality.

we just ain't that smart

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 6^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Acts 2:14a, 22-32

Psalm 16

1 Peter 1:3-9

John 20:19-31

 

 

So what is this resurrection thing? One certain answer is that I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Actually nor was anyone. Matthew suggests a couple of soldiers were hanging around, but they were asleep. I even suggest it was lucky for them that they were. This moment in cosmic history was too big for human vision. Or human understanding.

Perhaps since I’m doing a lot of work on the thought of Bishop Allen Johnston at the moment I may be permitted to quote him?

There are many divergencies between the gospel narratives of the Resurrection but there is one point on which they are without doubt: the strongly attested fact that the grave of Jesus was empty. It is absurd to suggest that this in itself proves the Resurrection. It does, however, emphasize the identity between the risen Lord, who is the object of faith, and Jesus of Nazareth. Had it not been for this identification, what justification would there have been for the writing of the gospels?

Strangely Jesus was not immediately recognisable, but the gospel is emphatic that the person a handful of women, and later a handful of men, met on the first day of the new creation was absolutely the Carpenter of Nazareth, absolutely tangible (though he asks Mary not cling to him), absolutely an event in human and cosmic history.

I think their point is that we just won’t ever get it, intellectually. Human beings on the scale of things aren’t that smart. Our absolutely desevration of the garden God has given us to live in is a reminder of that. Our greed, our disinterest, and a myriad other faults serve to remind us that we just aren’t that smart. Certainly when lined up against the smarts of the author of a rather big universe. Or universes.

So in the end the gospel writers – and they are all we have because the soldiers were snoozing – give us the language of the heart. Language of the heart that those first rather clutzy and very frightened witnesses were prepared to go on and die for. Language of the heart that transformed and transforms human lives. The followers of Jesus went on to tell a new story. I quote Johnston again:

They affirmed that death had been conquered; that by a tremendous manifestation of his power God had raised Jesus out of the home of departed spirits. They did not imagine that Jesus, like a ghost, had returned to spend some further period on earth. They affirmed that death hath no more dominion over him, that the universe had become a new place, that the new world order was already here, because Jesus had risen from the dead.

And I’m not going to explain that. On good days, though, I let myself be seized by it. And I’m hoping you do. Perhaps most often I am seized by it, in the days when I am in pastoral rather than educational ministry (but should we split the two?) when I stand at a graveside and whisper, stutter, proclaim those same worlds of hope we just heard read, from Peter’s epistle, stuttering to those who gather and to the unseen departed the words of faith,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.

I don’t what it all means. I know that it gives a hope that is far more than pie in the sky, because it is a hope by which shattered lives are healed, strength to carry on dispensed, energy to proclaim often risky justice, reconciliation, love birthed.

I hope in the past two years I’ve been able to share hints of that energy. I’ve not been your vicar, but hopefully I’ve been a fellow-traveller and hopefully I’ve been able to be a bearer of light. There’s no magic wand for tomorrow: there never was. The world is changing, the church is changing, but the hope that transformed our handful of frightened followers of Jesus is not changing. The strength for the future is God’s, not mine, not even yours. I can’t lead you into the tomorrow of this faith community but I firmly believe there is one. And I believe whatever happens to this place, this organization, even to us, that future is bright with the light of the risen Christ, who in all the uncertainty neither leaves nor forsakes us.

come, all

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

PALM SUNDAY (April 2^nd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

          

Isaiah 50: 4-9a

Psalm 31: 9-16

Philippians 2: 5-11

Matthew 27: 11-54

 

I have always claimed that I never refer to or repeat my old sermons, and I hold to that claim. There is though no doubt that on Palm Sunday, if I preach at all (and if we had the full liturgy I would not) that I come perilously close to it.

For 36 years, as a friend reminded me this week, I have at this liturgical celebration focused on my belief that this is the Sunday we celebrate getting it wrong. Or, more precisely, we celebrate our encounter with Jesus despite getting it wrong.

Perhaps I should explain. But I do want to address a misconception first. An awful lot of Christians get excited because they discover that a handful of passages, like the so-called “servant song” that was read from Isaiah just now, appear to predict the future Christ as narrated in the Christian gospels. I feel we need to be more honest. The gospel writers turned to passages like these and framed their Jesus stories in the terms of the constructs they found there.

Certainly Jesus was a servant like no other. Self-sacrificial, suffering, loving. Whatever Isaiah’s vision was about, it's wonderfully matched the first Christians’ experience of Jesus. But Isaiah had neither crystal ball not even divine insight, at least in so far as such insight provides unambivalent interpretation. Jews and Christians will and should interpret Isaiah’s poem very differently.

Paul, utilising a poem that he in turn may have either written or stolen - acceptable in days before intellectual property acts - sees this in terms greater still. This is the one who strode across, as it were universes, yet he so empties himself of all that he can be that this week we see him executed on a cross. He empties himself, as Wesley put it, of all but love. And we are the beneficiaries of that love, for it draws us mysteriously, inexplicably into the heart of God.

So why for 36 years have I taught that this is the Sunday we get it wrong? We stand with the crowd, and the crowd alas are terribly wrong. We stand with the crowd today and we will stand in the crowd on Friday. Samuel Crossman, in the seventeenth century, got it so terribly right. “Then crucify was all our breath, and for his death we thirst and cry.” It is thus because we look for a saviour in the glamour of human kingship: a Trump, a Putin, a Jacinda, a Kennedy. The radical shifts of politics left and right across the globe and across institutions in recent years suggest we live in an era desperate for salvation.

And always we will be let down.

Until after Good Friday. And it is to the depths of that day and its implications that we are invited to travel in our readings and in our liturgy this week, even if it is in shadow form. In that way we can find the God who dies for Ukrainians, yet also for Russians trapped up in someone else’s war, who dies for transgender persons, but also for women fearing that some transgender persons may just be exploitative and predatory persons dressed in another guise, who dies even for what are now called CIS White Males like me who are only too aware that some of the accusations directed at us ring only too truly.

So in this week of the passion we are invited to know that there are no limits, nor party politics, neither male nor female Greek nor Jew, slave nor free capable of blocking out the irrepressible love of God.