because of light and love

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

30^th ORDINARY SUNDAY 

(October 29^th) 2023

 

 READINGS

Deuteronomy 34: 1-12

Psalm 90: 1-6, 13-17

1 Thessalonians 2: 1-18

Matthew 22:24-36

 

I find it valuable when reading the scriptures of our faith to make some attempt to step into the headspace, even the heartspace of the central characters. The scriptures were written of course in a age vastly different to our own, stylistically, but on the whole humans are humans, and much of our journey is common ground. We are born, we learn, we love, we grieve. We breathe. We cease to breathe. And here, however stylistically written, we find an account of a great leader, an influencer in ways our contemporary Tik Tok influencers can only dream of, entering into death, that final mystery beyond all our understandings.

Like so-called Dives in Jesus’ famous tale of Lazarus and justice-based judgement, I would genuinely welcome someone popping back from death for a cuppa and a chin wag about the actualities of eternity. It doesn’t happen. As Jesus hints in that story, the human mind would pop with the complexities of never-ending love and life. Rationally I’m with the author of the final chapter of Deuteronomy. Moses breathed his last and the story, though of course not the influence, ends. At first it’s even where our psalm takes us: “like grass which is green, but by nightfall is withered up.”

That of course is the rationalist in me. But the end of the Moses story is not the end of the God story. there is an other dimension that seizes me and drives me on despite all that I see and rationalize around me. But hold that thought for a moment.

But the psalmist does try to take us further. In God there is no unrighteousness, and though the psalmist speaks only of the glimpse of sap and new life in chronologically weary bodies – for resurrection theologies were not as yet part of Hebrew understandings – the psalm closes with bold hope in a God in whom is no unrighteousness. That later Hebrew of Hebrews, Paul of Tarsus, will come to put it another way, trumpeting from the depths of his own journey that death itself, that universal unrighteousness, will be destroyed. Or as the great holy man John Donne put it, still more centuries later,

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

And so into contexts of grief and loss, individual or as horrific and collective as mass shootings in Maine (or Christchurch), or wholesale slaughter in Israel and Gaza, or Ukraine and Russia, Yemen, Sudan, or countless other killing fields, in such contexts we dare to stutter words of hope, and to reach out hands of compassion (and of justice). Paul did that, too, as he wrote to suffering churches, or sometimes complacent and cosy churches, in his ministry. That again is why we need to step into the shoes of the biblical characters.

To speak words of hope is a least one aspect of the love of God, the total love of God of which we are agents. Terribly fallible agents, but God’s totally fallible agents nevertheless. I suspect no hand would go up if we were asked who has loved God with all of heart and mind and soul. No hand should go up. That’s Paul’s point over and again when he talks of sin: all he says, fall short. It’s what Jesus addresses when in the Fourth Gospel he promises an advocate, the one we call Holy Spirit, who can and will pick us up each time we stumble.

Which brings me back to Moses. That great influencer who had no Tik Tok. He got some things wrong in his leadership. That’s why, symbolically at least, he reaches no further than Pisgah – which probably meant, incidentally, no more than “the highest place.” Whatever dwelt beyond the horizon remains inexplicable. But such was the mystery and the awe that Paul and others would experience centuries later that they would proclaim, to borrow Paul’s words, “If we have hoped in Christ only in this life, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

The story of Moses ends not with  TS Eliot’s bang or whimper, or Dylan Thomas’ dying of the light, but with a glimpse of that which is beyond words, the promise that Moses glimpses as his lights go out and a brighter light begins.

And because of light and love, though also because of judgement, justice, forgiveness and reconciliation, we are called to live and proclaim that light even though all many of us manage is a slightly self-conscious mumble. Christ is risen, the first fruits, proclaimed the early church, and so must we.

 

balancing

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

29^th ORDINARY SUNDAY (October 22^nd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Exodus 33: 12-23

Psalm 99

1 Thessalonians 1: 1-10

Matthew 22: 15-22

 

 

There is an almost shocking familiarity between Moses and his God in the depiction that we have of Moses’ determination to, as it were, unmask the God with whom he is chatting, in whom he is trusting, and in whom, indirectly, he is asking his people to trust.

To get the best out of the Moses scene we need to realize it is stylized. The setting is one in which the relationship between the Hebrews and their neighbours is fraught – we might remember the situation in the Middle East today, except that this narrative is clear that God, not bombs (or their equivalent) will provide the way out of trouble. But Israel has betrayed God with last week’s sacred cow: can the relationship be restored? God’s ongoing relationship is depicted as very cautious and tenuous, propped up only by God’s grace, or gracious forbearance.

Let’s step away from military parallels between the modern State of Israel and the ancient People of God – despite, of course, the DNA connection. We who are Christ-bearers have also too often made our sacred cows, and I don’t think I need to list the myriad ways we have neglected our responsibilities. I am not here speaking of the wider western world; I dare speak only for the community of faith – perhaps I dare speak only for myself?

But I want to park Moses there for a moment, in his daring tête-à-tête with God. It’s a little outside my experience, perhaps yours too. But there are important messages in the other readings, too. 

In the Psalm, for example, we find the author turning not to petition God to seek favours, but simply pouring out his or her heart in praise to God, with awe, with love, with a deep dense of the underserved privilege of access to the one from whom and towards whom all creation moves. 

It is a big call, of course; can we really speak of a God in the face of so much human-made and nature-made horror in the world, even in our own lives?

The psalmist dares to say yes. We only kid ourselves if we think difficulties in believing are a modern phenomenon. It’s not what we might call “sexy,” (or “chic” if we’re prudish), to cling to a belief in an unseen being, but it was ever thus. Surrounded by some pretty toxic enemies the psalmist, like the tellers of the Moses story, dared to believe. And – not unlike the donors and planners and builders of the great cathedrals of Europe – the fruits of risking belief often came long after the light of their own individual lives was extinguished (at least to human sight).

We and our forebears, Hebrew and Christian alike, have been called to believe despite all odds. It is no new thing. Moses’ crew found it much easier to turn to the much less complex option of a golden cow. Paul, so unpopular in many circles, believed against all odds. He poured out his lifeblood proclaiming resurrection hope to a disinterested world. 

Where his words sometimes fell on fertile soil he too often found, as in Corinth and Galatia, that the new and enthusiastic beliers soon turned to their own form of Golden cow: in Corinth they turned to showy sexual libertinism and social elitism. In Galatia they turned to rigorous, life-suppressing ritualism and again, probably, social elitism. 

In Thessalonica Paul seems to have found fertile ground and faithful stewards of the gospel, though later in the letter Paul will issue stern warnings to those believers, too: “Don’t be a slave of your desires or live like people who don’t know God,” he will tell them. Paul has been stung too often by the foibles of Christ-bearers. 

Matthew recalls Jesus’ condemnation of recalcitrant and renegade Sadducees, who have turned faith into a means of exploitation and oppression: too often we the Christian people of God have been the Sadducees, and Paul was at the very least taking a pre-emptive strike in writing to the Thessalonians, warning them of the risks ahead.

There is much to learn from Moses. I say again, few of us will or even should have the easy familiarity with God that was the hallmark of the great servants of God through history. Nor should we – perhaps they didn’t either, for I suspect the narratives cover up the fear and trembling with which they tapped God’s metaphorical shoulder. 

In the end though we find that to a person they all, even the one we came to know as Son of God, balanced that easy familiarity with deep reverence and awe. Aslan is “not like a tame lion,” as Mr Beaver warns the children towards the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I suggest even the second person of the Trinity, the one we know as Jesus and Christ, is not our mate but an inspirational revelation of the who and the how of God.

Strangely, perhaps, it is Moses in our highly symbolic first reading, that most models that balance between familiarity and awe.

 

kai time, whanau?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

28^th ORDINARY SUNDAY (October 15^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Exodus 32: 1-14

Psalm 106: 1-6, 19-23

Philippians 4: 1-9

Matthew 22: 1-14

 

I mentioned last week that the Bible can be awfully problematical at times. In the context of the Matthew passage this week I fins myself muttering “Really, Jesus? At the very least could you not have just stopped at the the end of the bit about a wedding hall full of guests?” So I did! If you check against a lectionary you’ll find a rather toxic four verses follow, but for now I feel it’s better to stop with the sense of God throwing open the doors of the banquet and ushering in the flotsam and jetsam of society.

Which may or may not be you and me. If we start thinking God owes us a favour and isn’t it lucky for God that we’re here, then we may belong in the omitted passage. For there, the God-figure tells a bloke wearing the wrong suit that he’s there on false pretences, and in typical Matthew style he is thrown out to join a bevy of teeth-gnashers and wailers.

We make light of a doctrine of judgment at great peril. There are forms of Christianity that say any old cloth will do. That I can live my life however I like, exploiting whoever I like, preying upon whoever I like, sneering at or bullying whoever I like, and, in good kiwi style, “she’s right,” or as they say in some parts of Australia, “she’s apples.” 

No – God is not a plaything, nor made in my image: to think that of God is to contravene that commandment about using the name of the Lord in vain, and God gets very grumpy about that. I don’t think, as I have said many times before, that God airily waves a nonchalant hand at the atrocities that we are seeing on both sides of the Israeli-Arab borders. I don’t think those who are sexual predators, especially sexual predators in the realms of faith, are airily dismissed as mere miscreants: such people desecrate the very essence of God.

But I do think we can grasp great and for want of a better word “eternal” hope in the over-the-top scene of the wedding banquet. Jesus in fact engages in a sort of dark humour in these passages, at least as they were recounted by Matthew decades later. No king is really going send a son chooffing off to face heinous murderers who have already killed all the king’s key players. Even tyrant kings are not that dumb. Well not often, and not when it clearly puts them at a disadvantage.

No: for all Matthew was writing for a persecuted audience, and therefore tended to tell his Jesus stories in such a way that the community could believe that persecutors would receive their come-uppance, for all that, there is a wonderful generosity in the parable of the wedding banquet. For the God-figure here throws open the doors of blessedness to you and to me, to our forbears and to our descendants.

The nonchalant and the murderous characters of this Jesus Parable are not the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus, those who didn’t get his messiahship. They are you and me and all who claim faith but who by our words and actions close doors faster, almost, than God opens them. We are, where we get it wrong, the nonchalant and the murderous.

Paradoxically we can also be those, the good and the bad, who are invited as a second option to join the feast of God. For all humanity is here invited to receive the mad generosity of divine love. We just have to accept the invitation. And live it. 

ayn rand was wrong

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

27^th ORDINARY SUNDAY (October 8^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Exodus 20: 1-4, 7-8, 12-20

Psalm 19: 7-14

Philippians 3: 7-14

Matthew 21: 33-46

 

Both the Bible and Jesus can be awfully problematic!

By this I mean not so much the awkward claims Jesus places on our lives – moral and ethical strictures in particular. They, by and large, make good sense when compared to philosophies of “Just do it” or “Have It Your Way,” both extraordinarily successful marketing slogans (Nike and Burger King respectively!!). Those philosophies can become at times the mantra of some parts of society, even of faith society.

If life is “anything goes,” and I am the only judge of all that I do or say, as seems to be the attitude or some parts of society, then we have nothing to say to for example the gang member who brutally assaulted a vulnerable person person  on a suburban street in Hastings. Nor at the risk of being political, do we have anything to say to a  leader of the free world – a former leader at the moment –  who believes it is okay to assault women, mock physically incapacitated persons or injured military veterans, or lie brazenly in order to boost business profits.

If anything goes, without restrictions such as those restrictions that our faith places on us, then we run the risk of becoming no more than a Lord of the Flies society, a Lord of the Flies world. Checks and balances are a paradoxical stone in the shoe – or, better, a nerve ends on the fingers of our conscience that tell when we are burning ourselves or others.

Jesus’s moral and ethical strictures by and large only ring-fence our more selfish inclinations. Or maybe I’m the only person who has those? But if taken seriously Jesus challenges us to look closely at those aspects of our own life that we shut away from the scrutineering of divine gaze. What part of my life assaults or even assassinates goodness, represented by the owner’s son in the parable, obliterates life-giving energies in the community around me, shuts down sources of light, metaphorical or literal, that make my neighbours’ lives bearable?

These are of course rhetorical questions. Or not quite: rather they are questions that only I can answer for my small life and you can answer for yours. But they are far-reaching. I may be a small person in the global scheme, but are there aspects of my life that deaden the signs of God’s goodness, God’s compassion and justice in the lives of those with whom I share a world?

Today’s odd, overly dramatical, caricatured portrayal of evil and even crass stupidity that Jesus places in a parable at the pointy end of his life journey: this is designed to shock.

This of course is slightly harder after two thousand years of using and abusing it in the service of Christianity. The murderous tenants of the parable have often been used as an excuse to persecute adherents of the Jewish faith, our cousins in Christ. There is no such permission in the word picture that Jesus draws. The tenants of the vineyard, the corrupt and wayward leaders of society, and more especially religious society, they are those who are destroyed in this over-the-top Jesus parable.

The vineyard though remains, and we are invited with all who practise decency and compassion, to be inhabitants of that vineyard. This parable does not limit habitation of the vineyard to any one people or any one faith, but opens the vineyard to all who practice Christ-like decency and compassion. The parable is about replacing all that is recalcitrant in our corporate and individual lives, all that is God-denying, love-denying in our corporate and individual lives, and allowing the growth there instead of all that is life giving and godly.

The challenge is for us, as Paul puts it in our snippet of his letter to his beloved Philippians, never to cease pressing on to the goal, the exercise in our own life of powerful life giving, Christ-emulating energies that benefit those amongst whom we live: personally, communally, and globally.

And for that we need the help of God continuously.