SERMON
PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
22nd ORDINARY SUNDAY (September 3rd) 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
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.
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