all-embracing christ

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

26^th ORDINARY SUNDAY (October 1^st) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Exodus 17: 1-7

Psalm 78: 1-4, 12-16

Philippians 2:1-13

Matthew 21: 23-32

 

 

If we were working systematically through a study of Matthew’s gospel account we would be at this point turning towards the finish line – if we were piloting an Airbus we might term this “on final.” I recall as a cross-country runner at boarding school this would be the moment I would dare to hope I might survive the experience, but as if to remind me that the pointy end of life is death it was also the point at which most of my friends would overtake me. I’m sure there’s a metaphor there somewhere? Certainly as a passenger on an aircraft I am reasonably convinced this is the moment I am going to die.

For the Jesus journey it was the moment death became inevitable. Unflinching in the face of growing opposition, Jesus from this moment on puts his metaphorical knife deeper and deeper into the hypocrisies of his society – a society simultaneously deeply religious and deeply corrupt.

Yet, for once it is another passage that profoundly unpacks the significance of this moment in the Jesus story. Perhaps a couple of decades after the events Matthew describes (and Matthew was writing at a still later stage) the passionate apostle Paul was describing Jesus’ life in terms of what the Greeks call “kenosis,” or self-emptying. Philippians was one of Paul’s last letters, written from prison, as Paul himself faced a likely execution. “Kenosis,” self-emptying to the point of death, is no trivial matter – far worse than a few tired metres on a cross-country course, or a few  moments of fear on approach to Wellington’s notorious airport.

And that in part is Paul’s point. Jesus, the inexplicably divine being, has so emptied himself, emptied himself of all but love, that it can only lead to tears and to death. And as he points his finger, especially with his parables in this chapter of Matthew, at religious hypocrisy, he is making any chance of escaping execution less and less likely. 

Paul sees this, given a couple of decades hindsight, with blinding clarity. The caveat “of all but love” made so powerfully by Charles Wesley (in a hymn we won’t sing today because we sang it recently), that caveat is an important one. No cosy room in safe places for the self-sacrificing God-man Jesus: only death. But that execution is the result of love. Love that proclaims justice, because love always will. Love and justice made the Jesus path dangerous because it poked the bear of religious hypocrites and their self-interest.

You may recall a passage that is to come up soon in our readings; as Jesus stands over the city of Jerusalem, he wishes that his beloved compatriots the Jewish people would turn back to the love and justice that the Law and Prophets demand. Like a mother – or as Jesus put it, like a mother hen – he longs for his people to return to the human decencies that are the standards and demands of dwelling in his home, paradise. But the recalcitrant child, Israel, or indeed humanity, will not come home, and the mother Jesus has only one choice left.

That choice, of course takes him to Good Friday, and more of that next Eastertide. For now though we must just recognize the extent to which this self-surrender of Jesus is reaching. Jesus, the self-emptying divine being enfleshed in our experience, this Jesus enters into our own waywardness and fallibility, our own tendency to do wrong things. There he breathes forgiveness and life and love and light and hope.

Forget for now, perhaps for ever, the language of pouring out blood for us as if Jesus’ primary task were to appease a grumpy and rather unjust god. Jesus enters into our failure to be the son-that-gets-it-right (eventually) in the parable he tells. Jesus, a bit like the brave souls who paved the way across the hillsides to Skippers or Macetown, like that but so much more, Jesus paves a way for us to pass the finish line (even if a few friends overtake us) or to land safely on the runway. 

The Lordship, as Paul describes it, of Jesus reaches into the deepest human grot and gets us over the finish line in his care.

 

St Paul's, Arrowtown

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

for the 150^th Anniversary of First Service in the Church

 

 

“Spirit of Place”

 

It was years ago that I flew to make a new life in Australia, having received most of my growing up in New Zealand. I tell you that only because at around that time I became aware of the Australian rock band Goanna, and their album The Spirit of Place. Years later, when I knew more of Celtic spirituality, I learned too of the notion of “thin places.” The Spirit of Place. Thin Places. Working with Aboriginal people particularly but not exclusively in the Northern Territory I leaned more of both these concepts. They have informed my Christians faith – but paradoxically my respect for other faiths, ever since.

So I don’t want to delay you with a long sermon breaking open a gaggle of scriptural passages – especially as I am not the person you espected to har as you gathered to remember 150 years. The readings touch on “spirit” at a stretch: the sense of longing for sacred space that the Hebrews had as they journeyed through wilderness years, the joy the psalmist had as he remembered his forebears journeying to freedom … Paul? Well … for him the encounter with Christ in scripture and worship became place in itself. Jesus? The link is tenuous, but perhaps the sacredness of opening ourselves up to the grace of the God who is all around us … but the links are tenuous. Perhaps I just stuck with the readings because I’m lazy! Though in the chaos of recent days I’m glad I did: the chaos of cryptosporidium (yeah, I practised that!), of burst water mains at St Peter’s, of declarsions of emergency and the discovery that the Queenstown church was then wasn’t an emergency centre for the town, the discovery that I was going to have to step up in place of our bishop at short notice.

I wonder what our forebears would have made of it. Mr Coffey, the truculent vicar, the generous benefactors Holmden and De la Perrelle, the first worshippers? Would they see progress or chaos in our days? What would they make of the liturgies that are a far cry from the solemn rites of Book of Common Prayer around which they would have gathered.

The good, the bad, the ugly: I chose traditional hymns today, hymns Mr. Coffey and his parishioners probably knew, and felt comfortable with (alongside those “comfortable words” that were a part of the old liturgies, and “comfortable” in more ways than one). But what would they have made of the one unfamiliar hymn, of Kendrick’s references to social justice: to killing fields, plunder and poison?

So maybe it was or maybe it wasn’t providential that I took the easy path in choosing to use the readings for the day so the bishop could wrestle with them. That came back to bite me! And yet, while we use a different cycle of readings to those Coffey and De La Perrelle and Holmden would have known, the bible is the same, the translation perhaps a little different, but the essence the same. And strangely the readings and the liturgy themselves can become a thin place, a sacred place whee heaven meets earth despite chaos, all the chaos that we see in our community and world.

Enough. The thin place, the spirit of place for us this day is this space of St. Paul’s, dreamed and laboured into being by its founders, kept alive by countless since, some you will have known, some you will not. Yet we meet with the same “bounden duty,” as Mr Coffey’s prayer book would have put it, to encounter, absorb and proclaim the Christ and his God met in our readings. We meet with two generations largely missing now, of course.  That’s a cha;;leneg Mr Coffeey would have been bewildered by. Generations missing would have been sternly rebuked. But that’s not our task.

Our task is to keep this thin place thin – regardless of the ups and downs of our own belief. Our task is to keep prayers whispered, readings read, songs sung despite all odds, because the generosity of those first donors – some of your ancestors – and even the truculence of stern old Mt Coffey the fierce Irish Protestant first clergyman, they were all like you and me tarnished building blacks in the mysteries of God.

Thanks for being here, and let's keep this thin place thin.

stumbling in valleys

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

22^nd ORDINARY SUNDAY (September 3^rd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Exodus 3: 1-15

Psalm 105: 1-7

Rom 12: 9-16

Matthew 16: 21-26

 

 

I have a couple of web pages that I run, and they provide me, kindly or otherwise, with performance charts. I like the charts not because I am particularly interested in the performance of my brain explosions, but because I love the aesthetic that the charts provide.

For a similar reason, when I was studying conflict resolution a few years back, I loved a book by an Australian academic, who described conflict resolution as being like crossing Australia from Sydney to Perth. That’s an endurance effort by any means chosen, but hills and valleys, plains and descents provide, when represented pictorially, a pleasing aesthetic.

Having crossed that big island east and west, south and north a few times over I would have to add that the reality is every bit as wonderful, no a million times more so, than the pictographs or charts I’m alluding to (especially once you move away from the coastal conurbations).

A quick coast to coast across te Waipounamu provides a similar image, incidentally, and we can do anything by playing with mapping scales! It can look like 3961 km, if we want it to. 

At any rate, although I am a mapoholic, I’m really wanting to engage with the Christ-following life of St Peter here, rather than with treks across the Nullabor or the Canterbury Plains.

And as Dr. Townsley made clear on our Gospel Conversations  this past week, here we glimpse Peter in a valley, perhaps a saddle between two hills. Caught maybe between Ben Lomond and Bowen Peak, or across the Bracken Saddle behind Arrowtown. Peter traverses from the wonderful if ambivalent moment of the declaration that Jesus is both Christ and, remarkably, Son of the Living God, to the dizzy heights of the Transfiguration which, inexplicably, we explore another time in the liturgical year. Spoiler: Peter will enter deep valleys yet, it must be said. And higher mountaintops. But he enters a valley here. 

Yet for now let’s just know that, while dramatic, Peter’s life is simply an echo of our own human journeys and our faith journey. I think for example of my own, because I don’t know many others, and I remember the peaks, the tumultuous scree slopes and valleys, ridgelines and plateaux, open plains and occasional potentially tedious flats – dare I mention here the Canterbury Plains in our country or the Hay Plains in Australia? Some of you will know one or the other or both. I remember times when my faith-walk has been electrifying, times when the universe has seemed terribly empty, times when I’ve stumbled terribly wrong tracks, and then inexplicably found myself in rich rain forest or breath-taking wide-open spaces – dare I mention the Nullabor again, yet also the McKenzie Country, Rakiura, the Tongariro Crossing  or the Milford? 

Peter was so human. To love, to stumble, to fall. To proclaim boldly and against all odds, as he did last week, “you are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and then only a week later in our time-scheme, to be chastised by Jesus: “Mate, you’ve got it wrong.” I don’t hear voices in my head, but I must confess there’s been times when I’ve felt the inexplicable energies of God redirecting me from the path I’ve chosen. “Mate, you’ve got it wrong.” I’m not going into details!

Even, tragically, the history of Christianity follows those inexplicable contours. When first, after the Resurrection, our ancestors in faith stumbled out across the Roman empire, preaching a subversive God of Justice, dismantling often at great cost the corruption of the Caesars and their minions, high on the ridgelines of success. Then, for more than a thousand years, becoming a part of the deep valleys of corruption and exploitation ourselves – though obviously, always, there were the great saints and small people who swam against the tide. 

And now, as we fall from the corridors of power, as we are pushed to the fringes of society, losing our false gods, our power-games and self interest, the Spirit may well be leading us or our descendants in faith to be once more the people that Peter was to become, humbled, yet enflamed at last by love and justice. 

As individuals and as a vast network of believing journeyers, that will be our path, but always in the hands of the God of Jesus Christ, for whom and in whom even our death is no more than a valley between hills of light.

Amen.