light in darkness

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday 17 (July 30^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 29: 15-28

Psalm 128

Rom 8: 26-31, 38-39

Matthew 13: 31-43, 44-52

 

 

I’ve kind of ignored Paul for the last four weeks, but I want to spend a few moments of your time (and God’s) giving the somewhat prickly saint a little bit of oxygen. 

My comments on him in the pew sheet notes this month [not online, sorry!] have been a little underplayed, but that is not out of any disrespect. Paul is an intensely deep thinker, as well as a stern but compassionate pastor. His writings deserve and stand up to the deepest levels of analysis. 

One of the most precious books on my shelves is a commentary on Romans several centimetres thick and, I am told, weighing just under two kilos. Unfortunately at the moment it is languishing in Green Island.

Why, you might ask, should Paul matter? Some see him as the great destroyer of the accessibility of Jesus. 

I think not.

Paul is the great interpreter of the Jesus-event. Jesus taught primarily in simple, broad and generally rural brushstrokes, word-pictures that offer vast interpretive possibilities of the God-culture by which he calls us to live. We’ve been seeing that the past several weeks.

But the Jesus-event, as scholars have described it for decades now, is not just his teachings. Rapidly the followers of Jesus came to see that his teachings, his entire life, death and resurrection, were inseparable. They saw that the events surrounding what we would now call his incarnation were utterly consistent with his teachings, were the embodiment of his teachings, in a way that one else, Paul included, could claim. Jesus, enfleshed in humanity, could not see that.

And he didn't write anything after the resurrection (or any other time, it seems). 

In writing to the Romans Paul was digging deep into that Jesus-embodiment. Unlike his other letters, Romans was written to an “audience” many of whom, most of whom did not know Paul personally. The letter is not corrective surgery like some of his letters, or what scholars call exhortative, like a coach yelling encouragement from the sideline, like Philippians. It is more or less a compendium of his understanding of all that Jesus was – and is. 

So Romans in particular is not readily adapted to two minute slices on a Sunday morning, and warrants two kilogram commentaries. Maybe we’ll dig deeper some time down the track, over good coffee. But that must wait. I, like Paul, need to win your trust.

Amongst other things, and especially in the few verses we just read from Paul, he is taking the whole of the Jesus-event and telling us to be encouraged, that we are not alone, that we can make it through the trials that human beings experience, whether in the 60s of the first century, or the equally calamitous 20s of the twenty first century. He wrote – or spoke – from his own deep experience.

For Jesus, Paul is constantly emphasizing, is all that we need to know or can know of the God who holds us in resurrection light. 

The event of Jesus’ resurrection, Paul is adamant in his letters to the Corinthians, cast light over every human life. And, he further emphasizes, that resurrection-event is implanted in our lives by the Spirit of Pentecost, who is all that we can long to know of Jesus, embedded in our lives, closer than our breathing.

So in this Romans passage today he speaks of the Spirit who dwells within us through thick and thin, holding us in the mystery of resurrection light and hope that is beyond human comprehension, yet strangely, in small glimpses, not beyond the comprehension of our spirits. 

Those unsustainable but irreplaceable moments in which we sense the presence of the eternal.  whether that presence be glimpsed in the depths of the night sky, the tonalities of fine music (regardless of our taste!), the love of a friend, the strange hints of eternity in liturgy presented well. 

These moments, Paul tells the Romans and us, sustain us through the direst personal or cosmic crises. As it happens, we too can by the grace of God be vehicles, channels of these moments to those around us.

Paul should know! He was sustained through dark times. So, he emphasizes, are we.

 

no crabgrass here, thanks

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday 16 (July 23^rd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 28: 10-19a

Psalm 139: 1-12, 23-24

Rom 8: 18-25

Matthew 13: 23-30

 

For any of you who are viewers of my Gospel Conversation YouTube programme  you will already be aware from my panellist Ellen Clark-King that Matthew the author has constructed his gospel-telling very carefully. Although chapters and verses weren’t invented as aids to reading the bible until many centuries later, nevertheless Matthew has placed at the heart of his narrative a large chunk of Jesus-teachings about what we would now call the reign, or as one of Ellen creatively put it, the culture of God. Matthew is telling his people, and as it happens that includes us (bet he never saw that coming!) that this culture-teaching is at the very centre of all things Jesus.

Over centuries, at least since Aquinas in the thirteenth century, we’ve tended to think more in terms of the death of Jesus as the central theme of gospel, occasionally with a glimpse of resurrection-reference thrown in as a softener, but Matthew is emphatic that God’s culture – a gender inclusive phrase that is preferable to “kingdom” in this context – is the heart of the gospel.

Our task then is to allow our lives to be invaded by Jesus, by Jesus-seed if you like, and in that way to allow ourselves to be overrun by his divine culture. And so … because God’s culture is not monochrome but a kaleidoscope of colour and command and responsibility and longing – we have parable after parable to extend our horizon and confound our expectation. Which, if we let them, they still can after 2000 years.

This parable of the weeds bends over backwards to emphasize that our responsibility is not to mastermind but to allow God’s growth to work within us. Tares and wheat in Jesus’ world looked very similar. But you will find countless contemporary examples here and now, too. Many of you as gardeners will know the problem well: couch or twitch, kikuyu, crabgrass, to name just some of countless examples. For us the task is one of surrender to the life-energies of the seed sown within us; but with a catch. We are called to surrender not to the weeds hidden with the grass of our own life of the life of our community, but to surrender to the energies of the Spirit who will lead us to discern those differences.

This is not to suggest we sit back and do nothing. It is to emphasize that we must offer our lives over and again in exposure to God’s Spirit. It’s not altogether helpful to know what kikuyu or couch (twitch) or crabgrass look like without then doing something about it. It’s not altogether helpful to know what loneliness or poverty look like without doing something about them. Doing something, that is, within our range of capability. God doesn’t ask me to climb ladders, or ask you, if it’s not your think to make public speeches or play for the All Blacks. God tailors, as we see in that stunning metaphor of God clothing Adam and Even as our protypes are sent out of the Garden.

How do I encounter Jesus in this context, how do I represent the culture of God in that context? Where I see in my own life or in the life of the community around me something that is counter-God, how do I speak God-stuff, God-culture, how do I enact God-culture in that realm? Like every good discipline faith takes practice, as Brother Lawrence, the Carmelite, put it in the seventeenth century. Meet together, read together, pray together, all these are training exercises. Pray and think alone, too, in creation, in a garden, a park … sit in a church … read … pray … however that looks for you. Do so alone and together, for these are practices, or can be, of the presence of God.

The call of the Parables of Divine Culture is not to condemn people to the pits of a fiery hell, but to discern and dismiss that within our own lives which needs to be eradicated, and, like ridding ourselves of crabgrass or even wildling pines, to chip away at the bigger questions in society as we can.

To these tasks we are called as we seek God’s help to discern and eradicate the tares, crabgrass, kikuyu and worse in our life and the life of our world.

good bad and meh

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday 15 (July 16^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 25: 19-34

Psalm 119: 105-112

Rom 8: 1-11

Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23

 

 

Back in the late 1980s Austrian-born psychologist Bruno Bettleheim published a book called A Good Enough Parent. Much of Bettleheim’s credibility has been dismantled in the years since then, and particularly after his death in 1990. Nevertheless, and I am not skilled in his claimed fields so cannot really assess his work, I do believe he deserves kudos for the title of that work. As a parent at that stage of two small children, struggling with various degrees of success alongside their mother (not Anne – or not this Anne)  to learn what parenting was all about, I purchased and pored over his book with relief.

Given the discrediting he has posthumously received, perhaps I was misled? Although since I have what one friend called “an unnecessary number of children” (and soon to be an equal number of grandchildren) and all of them have turned out to be wonderful, caring human beings, perhaps I was good enough.

Or perhaps their mothers made up for my deficiencies.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about at all.

What I wanted to extrapolate from the over-exposed Jesus teaching that we know as the Parable of the Sower, was a line that I think I have stolen from my wonderful successor-bar-two in the New South Wales parish of Casino. Because I think it was Sally – that is to say the Rev’d Sally Miller – who summarised this passage in our Gospel Conversations  for the week. She observed that our response should not be to bash ourselves up because our seeds are not growing, but simply to do the work and rest, as it were, in Christ. To rest in a state, as Sal put it, of “active hopefulness.”

What does this mean? It certainly does not mean hanging around doing nothing, giving up, throwing in the towel in the assumption that all gospel-faith is lost, irrelevant, dead.

And I know you well enough in this faith community to know that is not what you are doing. But what of the glory days, when churches were nearer to full, when off-spring attended, when … there are many whens.

I think part of Sally’s point is that in the services of God you and I are good enough. Some of us went through great revival times – I’m writing about them at the moment – when we kind of figured that the great glory days of the church were here. Except they never were. They were right days, perhaps, for the time … perhaps we can assume that. We can assume that even if they were the wrong kind of seed nevertheless in the purposes of God those past glory days had their God-breathed purpose. The church needed new energies, but it was not our task to dictate their future form.

We can too often bash ourselves up in the light of this parable. But today is not yesterday, and you are who in the mysteries of God have been placed here today.

A good enough parent? A good enough Christ-bearer? None of us are called to be what we are not. Sometimes that’s hard to believe. I remember only too well a scathing comment from a colleague, so-called, who announced to the congregation that he was sick of my incompetence. It was one of life’s crushing moments, but in the years since I have found more and  more strength in those remarkable words of Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3, as he emphasizes that some sow, others water, some even reap – but God gives the life force, the energy, the outcome.

That I think is the active hopefulness that my friend Sally was declaring in our conversations this past week.

I am encouraged when I find that Jacob, one of the most insidious and flawed characters of the Hebrew Scriptures, becomes a building block in the purposes of God. I find strength when I realize that David, whose CV was far from exemplary, becomes the proto-type of serving God. I find strength when fleeing Peter, or even grumpy Paul, become archetypal bearers of Christ and Christ-light.

I could go on but I have promised myself I will not. A good enough Christ-bearer. You, me, those we worship with each week. Flawed, struggling sometimes, but in the mysteries of God we are the people that God has scattered in this soil. In liturgy we offer ourselves as servants or living sacrifices to God. Our names won’t be in neon lights but as we offer ourselves again and again we may just be the chosen seeds of God – because we are just that.

get out of gaol? yeah nah

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and  St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday (July 2^nd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 24: 34-38, 42-49, 58-67

Psalm: Song of Songs 2: 8-13

Rom 7: 15-25a

Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30

 

Confession time: Matthew is my least favourite of the four gospel-accounts. He seems to me to be the most ready to cite Jesus-sayings that cast us and almost everyone into pits of hell fire and destruction. The little chunk missed out in this passage is precisely one of those glimpses: woe to you because you didn’t repent.

I’m not one for cutting out pesky passages, and part of my love of being a lectionary-based church is that I have to grapple with them – and together with you, in step with you, do so every few years. I never look back, incidentally, on past sermons: I have changed, you have changed, the world has changed, though as it happens last time I was with you wasn’t a Matthew year anyway.

But what do we do with pesky passages? Cherry pick? I think not. Leaving that bit out, that bit about woe, is a little naughty … “it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon than for you.” Tyre and Sidon were destroyed by God, according to the legends, in reality with the help of horrendous military action on the part of, first and unsuccessfully Nebuchadnezzar, and subsequently, brutally, by Alexander the Great.

The frenetic global warming we are experiencing, exponential as it is, may one day be seen likewise to be the work – or punitive permission – of a Creator God disappointed with the way humanity has looked after this beautiful planet and ignored a century of increasing warning signs.  

Dig deep enough beneath the modern lands of Lebanon and you’ll find Tyre and Sidon. But they are almost a side bar to our Matthew passage. Here Jesus simply laments, and the Creator God he dares to call Abba, Father, also laments. We played the flute and you did not dance. We sang a dirge and you did not mourn.  

Humanity is not just shuffling deck chairs on a sinking planet, but partying while we can. Humanity’s response to the majesty of creation, has been not to dance but to fell virgin forests, to fill waterways with plastic petrochemical sludge – you know the general scene. It’s not pretty, and neither you nor I have a get out of gaol card.

All of which would be bad news. Indeed some of the charlatan churches exacerbate the bad news with a “beam me up Scotty theology”: don’t worry about planet earth, because God is going to whisk us out of here. I think not. The sun shines and the rain falls on just and unjust alike.

So is this all no more than fatalistic bad news? As Paul often says, a little more comprehensible than much of what he says, “by no means.”

For Jesus does not leave us stewing in the morass of human detruction. He invites us, as it were to enter the manaakitanga, the welcome, the hospitality of God. He generates within us a yearning akin to the erotic yearning that is the stuff of our psalm this day. He generates God-connection which gives us the motivation and the strength to rise above – not outside, but above, in the sense of finding the strength to believe and hope despite all darkness, even during all darkness. 

That’s the essence of “come to me, all you who are weary.”

So it’s not “beam me up Scotty,” though we will all be beamed out in some way at some time at the closure of our lives, but come with me, be with me, know me as we ride through this morass together.

And the added bonus that we have known deep in our hearts since the first Easter – though we  may often forget it – is that the one who bids us “come” has already trodden the track, and is in that way infinitely equipped to take us and all who we love through to that invisible other side that the author of Revelation calls a new heaven and a new earth, and which we can never understand.

 

 

Cup of Cold Water

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

and  St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday (July 2^nd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 22: 1-14

Psalm 13

Rom 6: 12-23

Matthew 10: 40-42

 

Every three years lectionary-based preachers are faced with a most chilling task. How do we read Genesis 22 when we are no longer a society a society that thinks traumatising children is a good idea? No longer do we endorse Hans Christian Andersen’s dark tales about naughty girls and their punishment, or children lost in a wood and threatened with cannibalism, or old women who spank their starving children and put them to bed.

Some think – I don’t as it happens – that we’ve swung the pendulum too far the other way. Certainly we don’t want idyllic tales in which no trial is ever faced and all existence is sweetness and light, or tales of entitlement that make every child think that like a despotic leader they can anything and everything they want. I want Ukraine and I want it now is not a great mantra, nor a great reality.

But what do we do with the sheer psychological abuse God and Abraham impose on the teenaged Isaac? I had quite a nice dad. I’d be a little troubled if he had taken me up a hill with a big knife in very dubious circumstances. Sadly many children, and even more step children, continue to be traumatised by parents, usually but not exclusively male parents, teachers, coaches, clergy, wielding if not a knife then the brutality of sexual predation.

Yet here is this tale of Isaac’s trauma right at the heart of Judaism, and, especially when morphed into a story about a God who sends his son to be killed, the centre of  Christianity.

What we don’t do is chuck it out. There are dangers in deciding which bits of scripture suit our tastes and fashions which do not. Scripture guides and judges us, and though in reality we will always to some extent apply our judgement to scripture, we are called as a People of the Book to do so in the expectation that we, not our forbears in faith or our God, are the ones needing a little bit or a lot of pruning and redemption.

So let’s not read Abraham and God as evil tormenters, but let’s read them. And let’s read them wearing the right lens. Rabbi Sacks writes,

What God was doing when he asked Abraham to offer up his son was not requesting a child sacrifice but something quite different. He wanted Abraham to renounce ownership of his son. He wanted to establish as a non-negotiable principle of Jewish law that children are not the property of their parents.

Children were no more than property in the ancient times of Abraham. Children were sacrificed, too, to appease angry or ravenous gods. Children were sacrificed in much the same way as they were sacrificed by institutions, state and church, that turned their backs on rumours of abuse. Children were sacrificed on the altar of power abuse.

Let’s not read Abraham’s binding of Isaac as history. To do so is potentially demonic. The church has done demonic too often. But in this powerful parable, fable, call it what we will we find the ancient world’s record of abuse is challenged and broken by God. 

The point of the story is that, in a world where children were given up to abuse and even sacrifice, Abraham is prepared to trust God’s loving intervention. And of course we know that there are far too many cases of broken lives where neither God nor human has intervened, but that is precisely our role: God empowers us to speak up and to intervene in the face of all forms of evil.

And, believe it our not, that us where our cup of cold water comes in. Remember our cup of cold water? Jesus said Wheresoever we give a cup of cold water, wheresoever we speak out, wheresoever we intervene – and otherwise act – in the interests of the vulnerable, so we do the work of God. So we are called to do – for the disadvantaged, the lonely (not always poor, sometimes poor in the spirit) the vulnerable.

So may God help us to do.