AT
St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI
Te Pouhere Sunday (June
11th) 2023
READING:
John 15: 9-17
We have no idea how the author of the Fourth Gospel – we call him John but don’t know who he was – gained his insight into the deepest and most interior thoughts of Jesus. Whatever he wrote down it had to be consistent with what people knew of Jesus … for those of you who remember him for example, over a similar timespan it would be no use for me to write of Rob Muldoon as a gentle and accommodating man. Narrative needs to match truth.
John’s story of Jesus a handful of key themes at the heart of the story – and the greatest of those themes, as St Paul might say, is love.
I want to emphasize what some
of you may have heard me say on the Gospel Conversations, love is love. Though
of course what love is is also a bit complex at times. Sometimes we succeed,
sometimes we trip up. Jesus didn’t, though thank God he knew, knows that we do,
sometimes, and loves us still.
Love was and is at the centre of everything for Jesus. And for John
On this
Sunday of the year, a Sunday to recall the highly distinctive nature of
our New Zealand Anglican Church, to remember the beauty, often forgotten, of our
role as a three tikanga church, we have the gift of this call to love from the
heart of Jesus.
To what? To love? But then ...what is love?
And don’t expect the definitive answer from me. We’re all
just stumbling in the dark. But there are some yesses – and the noes are
obvious.
Disunity is not love, but unity – Father, may be one as we are one – unity is.
Unity of course is not uniformity. As I read through the history of our in New Zealand I notice that it was not until the mid-1970s that the dominant cultures began to get the message, or some sort of inkling of the message … that unity is not about Māori Anglicans looking like Pākehā Anglicans in attitude, behaviour, worship, theology, amongst other fields.
Slowly, since then, we’ve been learning to
hear the Māori voices in all those fields and more. That’s why, incidentally, I’m committed to
the use of te reo in liturgy, but that for now is another story.
Neighbourliness, too, is closer to love than “disputefulness,” if that’s a word.
Who is my neighbour? At the very least it may be someone who needs my time, my shirt, my r u ok, my roof … someone who needs my love not just as lip service but as practical commitment. The Samaritan, we might recall, gives all that and more to the man who fell amongst thieves, a man who should have been his sworn enemy.
Am I good
at it? No.
Love may just be about learning to share the sacred space of hongi – of course bearing full awareness of the risks of virus, but grasping what the inbreathing of one’another’s space can mean in our whanau of faith.
Okay … I haved never been
good at it, but life is a learning that love is about more than hugs or even
hongi, but about walking in shoes – and then giving them to someone whose feet
are more sore than mine. Love is what we might call inter-involvement. What is
my sister’s or my brother’s most poignant need? Te pouhere, the interwovenness
of our cultures in faith, demands of us that we hear that question.
Te pouhere asks us to
ask ourselves: do we hear the question? Do we walk with our sisters and
brothers in the whanautanga of faith?
And in all this, as the Jesus of John’s Gospel story reminds us, we need that gift of Holy Spirit to
make present to us the giftings of God. Come Holy Spirit, come.
