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.