future-scaping? no thanks

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the MISSION HALL, GLENORCHY
ORDINARY SUNDAY 4
(January 28^th) 2024

 

READING          

Deuteronomy 18: 15-20

As a concession to the 21^st  century I have set myself something of a challenge this year. It may sound counterintuitive for someone who has at least some pretence to be a biblical scholar, and who has always emphasised the place of scripture in preaching.

But while I do not believe that our practices of faith should kowtow to the busyness and noise of the society around us, so, no, we will not be having light shows and dry ice, I do recognise that we are not as well trained in listening and other habits of concentration as our forebears were.

As I look back over years of listening to four readings each Sunday I wonder if my commitment to biblical exposure wasn't hopelessly idealistic. I recognise that my own eyes would glaze over somewhere near the second sentence of the first reading and the rest would pass me by.

Consequently, I am in all the services of our parish reducing the number of readings – well except at St Paul’s where we’ve only ever had one at least since I started back here. Hopefully this will be an aid to our concentration and absorption. I will still do my best to rotate the readings in such a way that we get as broad an exposure to the texts of our faith as we can digest in a post-modern world.

That said, for those of you who are here week by week you know I’ve been doing this all January. But today is one of those challenging days when I feel to be fair I have to engage with the Hebrew scriptural text, and it is not at first sight the most riveting.

It seems that God in this text is being almost petulant in responding to the Hebrews’ whinging, and provides them with what the author calls, in the voice or Moses, “a prophet like me.”

But the authors are being careful here. The Hebrews were surrounded by cultures obsessed with oracles, soothsayers, the equivalent of crystal ball gazers. Had there been the counterpart of our astrologers’ columns their pages would have been well thumbed as punters desperately tried to discern their future.

Moses, speaking in the name of his God would have none of it. The God of our scriptures is almost militantly opposed to what I call future-scaping.

Consequently the tradition that we know as prophecy throughout the scriptures has nothing to do with Nostradamus and his convoluted nonsense – and I pull no punches there – or to the kind of predictions that say a tall dark stranger will tie up our shoe laces. Indeed, I want to be more militant still and assure you that prophecy in the hands of the servants of God has nothing to do with deciding that Putin, Trump, Biden or any other social and political figure is the Antichrist.

Perhaps this is a moment for me to say if you want to know more of my opinions on the matter feel free to purchase my book: available at a discount rate of only $25!

But I partially jest, much though I would encourage any of you to have a browse through my book. The far more important point is that the role of the prophet in the scriptural tradition is one of interpreting the present in the light of God’s call to justice and righteousness and compassion, interpreting the present in the light of God’s recurrent promise, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the ages.”

At the time at which Deuteronomy was written the Israelites were tempted to consult not only with all sorts of charlatans and to use their often lurid practices as a means to twist God’s arms. Such practices reached even to the extent of child sacrifice, but more commonly involved the throwing of dice like the Book of Mormon’s much loved urim and thummin, the writing of curses on food bowls calling for the execution of the state’s enemies, and a myriad other forms of magical nastiness. Such things grieved the heart of God and the authors of Deuteronomy were very keen to make that clear.

What then for us? I don’t want to say that demons leap out of the pages of astrologers’ vacuous prognostications in magazines and newspapers. In fact I think there is a greater element of the demonic in pseudo-Christians’ writings condemning various portions of society or leaders of society to hell, while often celebrating supposed worthiness of quite obviously dangerous and deceitful social leaders. I probably do not need to identify anyone, and there have been charlatans in every age. I do however maintain rigorously that it is by their fruits, including the fruits of their personal lives, that you shall know the servants of God.

Again: where does this leave us? It leaves us looking for the deliberations of those who urge justice, compassion, neighbourliness, concern for the most vulnerable, and, in short, all that came to be embodied in the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity.

No matter which side of the political fence we sit on in this or any country our leadership will fall short of the glory of God, also known as the fullness of Christ-likeness.

Our task with the aid of the Spirit of Christ is to watch and to look and to ponder and to see in each situation which leaders and which actions best express the values of the God of the Cross.

gate-keeping

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
ORDINARY SUNDAY 3 (January 21^st) 2024

 

READINGS        

1 Corinthians 8: 1-13

Psalm 139: 62: 5-12

Mark 1: 14-20

 

 

You may notice that the reading from Paul is not the set reading. I would like to claim that this was because I was working to some sophisticated plan, but in fact it is because I read the wrong date in the lectionary.

It is a strange reading. To make sense of Paul at any time we need to know the context to which he was writing. The new Christian believers there were playing up, and some of them are doing so in quite despicable ways.

Some of us will have seen churches with the old pews reserved for specific donors and verboten to mere hoi polloi. But the nearest to reserved family pews we see now is probably at funerals and weddings, when pews are set aside for those most central to the event at hand.

One of many things that was happening in a very bad way in Corinth, was that the wealthy and the powerful had slipped into habits of pride and arrogant self-preferment. In many ways the superficialities of our passage shouldn’t delay us too much. At that level we’re probably going to engage with questions of little more gravitas than whether or not we eat at a Hare Krishna restaurant. Paul’s answer at surface level is simple: will it hurt the faith of those we’re eating with? It’s not a particularly important question outside of Auckland anyway – I’m not even sure if they still run the restaurant that I used to eat and argue at in Queen Street, though I did find one in Brisbane.

But there are deeper questions here. What in my lifestyle detracts from the claims that the gospel makes on me? I remember years ago encountering Ronald Sider’s seminal book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. Sider, an American Evangelical from an era before that phrase was irrevocably tainted,  powerfully reminded Global North Christians like me that our comparative opulence dismantles, for those living and dying in refugee camps, at the claims we make for a God of love.

Where, you might ask, is all that in a passage about food offered to idols? A wonderful Roman Catholic researcher named Jerome Murphy-O’Connor was one of the first to bring to my attention if not to the attention of biblical interpreters full stop, that the poor of Corinth could not afford meat unless it was effectively second hand.

Second hand meat sounds a putrid concept, but what was meant that the meat that was offered to idols and not eaten by said idols was then often on-sold to Corinthians with limited budgets. There are questions of social justice and even education going on here. The so-called “strong” in Paul’s letter, to use a word borrowed from Romans but which does not appear here, are effectively rubbing the noses of the so-called “weak” in their lesser knowledge and faith. The so-called strong were not necessarily spiritually stronger, but economically more powerful: perhaps we can think again of the wealthier families who insured that as they sat in the better pews, closer for example to the heaters: the poor were left with only what the Syrophoenician woman called the scraps left under the table. Paul will have none of that.

The so-called “strong” operating their spiritual as well as their economic superiority. Paul refers several times particularly in the Corinthian letters to those who are “puffed up” with self importance. Here too he approaches the criticisms that Jesus levels if the scribes and the Pharisees in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

Paul had no time, just as Jesus had no time, for any kind of arrogance, spiritual, economic, or worse: both. And the forms that this can take are often very subtle. If the Anglican church has a tendency to its own form of sin it is that we can too easily demand a high level of literacy, and even in some places badges of social standing, to become a prerequisite to membership. I have told here before the story of the tattooed Māori friend of mine who was told that she had come to the wrong church.

I don’t think that is a problem for our faith community. But we are called to look at the sometimes subliminal barriers that we erect around our faith. As part of my historical research I’m finding that with the very best of intentions our forebears in the church contributed to the loss of two generations by somewhat condescending attitudes towards younger generations trying to find their way and their voice in life. The attitude was as if the church gatekeepers of the time had adopted the stance of the strong in Corinth, and the result was the empty pews that dominate our narrative today.

Every time I encounter this passage in Corinthians and its sibling passage in Romans I find myself wondering how we can do better, how we can better exercise the responsibilities of open access to the faith and the joy and the love that we have found in Christ. In the year ahead I hope we can look at many ways in which we as Christ bearers can improve our profile in the society in which we have been called to live. We are custodians here of what is really both a sacred site and a sacred drama. Our task is to make it as open and accessible as possible.

on hitch-hiking

 

SERMONETTE at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
ORDINARY SUNDAY 2
(January 14^th) 2024

 

READINGS        

1 Samuel 3: 1-10
Psalm 139: 1-15, 12-18
John 1: 43-51

 

 If you were to read through the Bible, as some brave people do, from Genesis 1 to the end of Revelation, you would find there are many passages depicting what we have come to know as the calling of a servant of God.

We are all at the very least by dint of our baptism, servants of God. It is not a term that should be reserved to those who wear their collars back to front (an aberration in any case that crept in in the 19th century and to which I rarely subscribe these days, liturgical and pastoral rolls excepted).

What scholars call the “calling narratives” are highly stylised versions of the encounter between a fallible human being and his or her Creator and Lord, a moment at which God nudges a person in a way that normally results in the redirection of the person’s life. The depictions are highly stylised in a way that I don’t think is quite so familiar in New Zealand as it is in everyday conversation in Australia.

There, though, I was struck for the best part of 30 years by the unchanging existence of little formalised conversations. The main one that comes to mind is a throwaway comment about eating or buying seafood, or more especially being on a seafood diet, to which a respondent will say “see food and eat it,” all present will knowingly laugh politely.

In ancient literature, especially oral literature such as much of the Bible was, the formulae were widely accepted. They were a kind of narrative punctuation by which the narrator could bring his or perhaps her audience back to a central theme. They punctuate, for example, great myths, or the works of Homer. Again: perhaps the closest we have in our culture is when a classroom teacher engages in a clapping routine together the students’ attention and regain, it is hoped, some semblance of order. Clap clap clapity clap – you know the routine.

I say all this because calling scenes such as those we have her today can give the impression of some quite freaky encounter with a divine voices, or writing in the clouds. Perhaps this is the experience of some. More often it is a way of describing something that is all but beyond description.

At the risk of being narcissistic may I cite an example from my own journey? I may have told you this before. You may have better examples of the nudges of God in the narratives of your own life.

Nevertheless I am often asked how I experienced the call to ordained ministry, to priesthood as I would now tend to call it. It began as a very clear momentary experience as I hitchhiked from Tauranga towards Palmerston North. I remember little else of the journey; it was one of countless (after all I had a girlfriend or two in Tauranga!). I remember clearly an already somewhat decrepit Holden Belmont pulling over to pick me up.

Soon the almost inevitable conversation ensued. “Where are you heading?” obviously. “Palmy.” “What do you do there?” “Student.” “What are you studying?” “English lit.” Perhaps I’m superimposing countless different lifts, but the next response was usually something like what on earth (or some stronger epithet) are you going to do with that? I declared that I was going to be a secondary school teacher.

That by the way is something that I have never ceased to thank God that I did not become. I would have been a terrible teacher. That does make me wonder why I became for a while the diocesan ministry educator, but that is an entirely different story. Maybe. 

Somehow as an afterthought, totally without precedent, I added “or a minister,” the word I would have used in those days. The smell of alcohol was reasonably heavy around the trusty Belmont, and the driver’s navigation skills on the left-hand side of the road were a little arbitrary, but for the next 40 or 60 kilometres this didn’t seem to worry me for once.

My benefactor spent those kilometres telling me of his greatest regret in life, that he had had six sons, and as a somewhat lapsed Roman Catholic, he lamented still that none of them had entered the priesthood. Seeds of a new consciousness entered my head.

In fact I even thought of becoming a Roman Catholic priest. It wasn’t the dreaded spectre of celibacy that put me off, but the sheer terror of spending several years in a place as cold as Mosgiel. It has occurred to me in more recent years that God has had the last laugh on that one.

In the end in any case I discovered that the Anglican church officially used the term “priest” for its clergy once they had, most of them, completed a training year as a deacon.

You’ve probably heard that story before, because it is one of the most vivid connections I find between the story of my own life and that of the scriptural characters. I was no saintly Samuel holy enough to receive the voice of God in the middle of the night. I was a somewhat lackadaisical student bumming my way around the country by courtesy of generous government allowances, long gone because my generation got rid of them, but that’s another story.

Over the next few years, several years, that first dawning of a priestly vocation was sternly tested in several ways. Those are neither here nor there. And of course, as an aside, I have had at least one parish in which a small cabal were more than willing to assure me that my drunken Catholic friend, making his way home from the races in Tauranga, was clearly not a voice-piece of God. That’s not for me to judge.

I was at the time in a parish, All Saints’ Palmerston North, in which any sense of a call to ordination was not seen as particularly important, and the real deal was a call to missionary service. But somehow the impetus continued and several years later my priestly career began in the Cathedral of St. Paul, in Melbourne. I may of course be deluded, but on the whole despite some wobbles, I've seen enough signposts on the way to suggest that my drunken Catholic friend was katiaki, custodian, in that moment, of a significant message from God.

Another time I may tell you about a horse that helped me gain Anne’s hand in marriage, but I suspect you may fear I’m already Lulu enough. The more important point is that while some of us are at this stage of our lives unlikely to experience new and unexpected calls to full time or specialist ministry, the knowledge of God in other ways is never far from our lives. My vicar in Palmerston North often used to use the mantra that we should not give reason why God is calling us to missionary service, but reason why not. In his hands that slogan was more of a recruiting call for CMS, but there was something deeply profound in it, and perhaps he knew that all along.

Because in the strange serendipity of your life and mine God is never far away, nudging us to show love even in the form of a slightly timid smile, or to show willingness to serve perhaps by picking up a tea towel, perhaps by pausing to speak to a lonely person, if not each day then each week or month or lifetime. And sometimes, and I truly mean only sometimes, you will have got it right, and sometimes you will again.

And whether I got it right is not the issue. The issue is that somewhere, mysteriously, our God is knitting our lives together in an incomprehensibly vast tapestry of creation and redemption for us and for all with whom we rub shoulders. We may not often be sitting under fig trees or lying on a cool hard floor in the middle of the night, but those little nudges of God are always floating around for us to notice and respond to.

May God help us so to do.

some thoughts on a wet head

 

SERMONETTE at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
BAPTISM OF CHRIST (and of Elizabeth McDonald)
(January 7^th) 2024

 

READINGS        

Genesis 1: 1-5
Psalm 29
Gal 4: 4-7

Mark 1: 4-11

 

What is this unusual event that is celebrated several days after Christmas? Early in the adult life of Jesus, and at the very beginning of his public life, he makes his way out to the wilderness to receive a baptism for the forgiveness of sins at the hands of his kinsman John.

We should immediately hesitate if we are reasonably immersed in the traditions surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, for we have come to know him not only as the Christ-Messiah, but in Christian teaching as the one who is sinless. It is no wonder that the Baptiser is recorded as having hesitated before submitting his cousin to a rite of forgiveness. The gospel writers were hardly unaware of the enigma that this scenario presented.

As it happens, at least at St. Peter’s, we have the privilege of hosting the baptism of a small and reasonably highly energised human person on this day. I remember one of my theological lecturers assuring me that as my children reached the age of two I would have no difficulty in believing in the doctrine of original sin. His tongue was at least partly firmly in his cheek, but it’s not rocket science to realise the human beings are not particularly perfect even, if not especially, at the age of two. And as some of you will know I have a reasonable experience in the bringing up of children.

So something unusual is going on here, but what is it? Interestingly it is immediately following this event that we engage the remarkable and highly symbolic story of Jesus in the wilderness undergoing bitter temptation. It is as though both stories were emphasising the extent to which the one who early Christians came to know as Lord was indeed utterly human, and not some sort of AI robot set loose upon the blue planet.

And for now that’s almost all I need to say because as Mark’s hasty, energised telling of the gospel story unfolds we will see again and again the deep compassion and humanity of the Man of Nazareth. Hopefully again and again we will have cause to wonder, in a phrase I often use, what a nice God is doing in a place like this.

For what we have in this enigmatic moment is the strange truth, held dear by followers of Jesus, that God is prepared in Christ to enter into the deepest experiences of human sin, or to use the word I prefer, fallibility, and transform them into a place of hope against all odds.

But what that all means is something that we will explore together, many of us, as this year continues. In the meantime let me just hint that I believe we have here what I might call a pre-enactment of the events of Holy Week and Easter, as the one who is the absolute revelation of God enters into all human darkness and ignites there an inextinguishable light.

We might remember that each time we light a candle not only in liturgy but in all the wonderful celebratory moments of life in the year ahead.