two digits from the truth

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the MISSION HALL, GLENORCHY

 

on the SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (February 25^th) 2024

 

READINGS

Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16

Psalm 22: 21-31

Mark 8: 31-38

 

As you may recall, last week we touched on two highly regarded recitations of Mark’s Gospel-account that have gone the rounds of the English speaking world in the decades that I refer to as post Beatles western society. Will you to be at one of those recitations you would have been listening and watching 4 just a little under two hours to hear the 11,300 words delivered. If you were part of a typical audience, and indeed if you were a part of Mark’s original audiences, you would have been spellbound.

You would also probably have noticed that this passage in Mark refers back to an incident some hundreds of words earlier. In Chapter 6 Mark relates the occasions on which Herod and others were asked to explain who they thought Jesus was. Those kind of summary statements are regurgitated in this scene, But the impulsive Peter is prepared to go one step further. There is a sense in which he gets it right, but while the comparison is horrendously unfair to Peter, I’m reminded of moments in which Mr. Trump has been asked to make some comment about or based on the Bible. Some syllables emerge, but they seem to be empty of the powerful insight that is granted Christ-followers through the input of the one we know as Ruarch, Pneuma, Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity.

And as we journey on through Mark’s Gospel, even without the references to the Spirit that emerge in John and Luke and Paul, we will begin to realise that that is precisely the point of understanding to which Mark is leading us. To import from those other biblical writers for a moment, Mark’s point is that until we have encountered the full extent of the descent of God in Christ into human experience, and the ascent of God in Christ into the unimaginable experience of resurrection, we have no grasp of the Jesus event or the Jesus message.

And for once our Hebrew scripture reading provides us with some help, a teaching aid or corroboration from a more ancient time. Because the story of Abraham and Sarah provides some useful parallels as a journey from below par comprehension, and in the case of Sarah, bitter incomprehension, to enlightenment and realisation of the power and majesty of God. That story too is something of which we will gain glimpses in the months to come.

But for now, Mark turns to Jesus and his very stark dealing with Peter’s brash but uncomprehending words. There is no genuine way to wriggle out of the phrase “Get behind me Satan.” Jesus is simply not being warm and cuddly, fuzzy and sweet in this moment of bleak contrast between misunderstanding and understanding. For once I’m helpfully reminded of my Year 5 maths teacher of very unblessèd memory, who when I brought to his desk my maths book with my attempt at the answer of what I presume was a reasonably complex question, exclaimed “close enough” when the answer I reached was only one or two digits from the truth. In many ways that was the end of my mathematical career, but that is another story. The point made here is not mathematical but what theologians call “soteriological” – there’s my Scrabble word for the week – that is to say concerning salvation, or as I would prefer to say, concerning our surrender to God’s immeasurable and unquenchable love.

Peter was right, but if I can now be unmathematical, not right enough. Like the ball of a bowler that shaves the stumps but does not dislodge the bales, this moment illustrates a miss, not a hit, an empty appeal, not a wicket.

Jesus of course goes on to outline some astounding demands of his followers. I for one will admit that I have not accomplished them. Few do. Some would say none do, I though make allowances for those who surrender their lives in martyrdom for their faith or for those whose lives are an immeasurable testimony to faith; I think of a Desmond Tutu or for example a Céire [kayra] Kealty (you’ll have to Google  her!).

For most of us though the journey continues to be a stumbling, meandering, rather Peterish series of blunders, and for many of us, and I think of myself, ordinariness. But that is not the point Mark is making. Or it is, but indirectly. Because in the end the overall story that Mark tells is of ordinary people who dared to stumble, but stumble in the way of the cross. Peter got it wrong, and so will we, but he did stumble on, and eventually becomes the sign of what a life can be invaded by the restorative patient love of the risen Christ made present through the Spirit of God.

[For those of us at Saint Peter’s the banner above my head remains as an enigmatic reminder of the transformation of an ordinary life. While I suspect it is the stuff of legend, it is traditional to believe that Peter was eventually executed by crucifixion upside down, because he felt himself unworthy to be executed in the same way as his saviour. It’s a powerful legend, though somewhat unlikely psychologically, militarily or historically. The Romans were unlikely to acquiesce to such a request, hastening the suffering thereby of the martyr’s death. But it stands outside history, a story inflamed by spiritual possibilities to remind us that all of us who stumble can open ourselves up, often through repeated stumbling, lifetimes of stumbling, to be agents of the Reign of God and its proclamation in word and preferably action.]

a man in a hurry

  

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT
(February 18^th) 2024

 

READINGS

1 Peter 3:18-22

Psalm 25:1-5      

Mark 1: 9-15

 

Back in the 1980s an actor named Alex McCowan had a huge run of successes performing a recitation of Mark’s Gospel account around the world. His venues included both the Edinburgh Festival and the Festival of Sydney – goodness knows where else. Unfortunately, although I was in Sydney for the festival the week he performed I was unable to get a seat - and that despite my brother being on staff at the festival - because it was sold out.

Even at the time, and it was around the mid ’80s, it struck me as both amazing and extraordinary that in a fiercely secular city at a fiercely secular festival a recitation of one of the books of the Bible would draw sellout crowds – as indeed it was doing around the world, including New York.

And yet a part of me gets it. Mark, and I am conservative enough to see no reason why he may not have been the companion of Paul mentioned just eight times in the New Testament, is a man of urgent passion There is a tendency amongst biblical scholars in my more liberal tradition automatically to assume that whoever is traditionally considered to have been the author of a biblical book probably wasn’t, as you can see by my notes on our reading from 1 Peter. Sometimes I think the scholars are right, sometimes I think they are wrong, and I am arrogant enough to trust my own judgement.

But I digress. Mark, unfortunate enough to be the companion of Paul fell out with the prickly pastor. Many people did. Yet it is a sermon in its own right to know that Mark and Paul found ways to work together despite their differences, resolved their disputes, became powerful forces in the proclamation of gospel hope.

Let us leave that thought there. But we are I think invited to explore the question why did Mark’s gospel account, as admittedly recited by a great actor, play to packed houses around the English-speaking world? And in our reading today we are given one of the most powerful examples of a reason. There is no pause for breath. Jesus is baptised. Commissioned to do God’s work, and immediately sent out to the place of pain, self-doubt and suffering. As it happens pain, self doubt and suffering uh exactly where the story will end. Or, depending on our understanding of the end of Mark’s gospel account, where the story will not end. But of that more in the weeks and months to come.

Mark the writer is in a terrible hurry. He is an instinctive storyteller. He would not top the grade in English classes. John and Luke in particular we are masterful creative literary minds. Matthew too, though perhaps a little more given to hell fire and fury. No, Mark is the sort of figure I often saw around campfires in Australia, perhaps more than New Zealand at least in Pākehā culture, telling yarns. And a yarn, far from being untruth, is often the most powerful vehicle of truth, as Jesus demonstrates in his telling of parables.

Mark is in a hurry. Forty-one times he uses the adverb “immediately.” Were I his English teacher I would mark him down for overuse. But I was not and am not, and thank God the gospel is not dependent on literary snobs. Mark was in a hurry. Perhaps like many of the early Christians this was because he had a pressing sense of urgency, an expectation that the predicted return of Jesus would come soon. We may sneer at that, and many critics of Christianity do, but I fear we do so at some considerable risk. Either speaking in a faith-based way, or in the shadow of nuclear, environmental, economic, or astronomical disaster, or in the shadow of our own mortality, we are never far from the sword of Damocles.

Mark was in a hurry. He tells of a Jesus who is sent from what for most people is something of a peak experience, a rite of passage, albeit one conducted by his somewhat dour cousin John, sent into the harshest, most inhospitable places of geography or of the human psyche. He is sent there to wrestle with demons, however we understand that.

But there in that wrestling, we begin to see the kernel of Mark’s urgent message. Neither demons nor darkness nor death are permitted the final say. We will come to the closing remarkable words of Mark’s original story in several weeks’ time, but many of us will be aware that his ending was so shocking that at least two early Christian writers edited and amended it. Badly, I would dare to say, and it seems to me that their much weaker endings stand in the scriptures as a reminder to us of how we should not water down the shocking news of resurrection.

But that for another time, too. For now, Mark simply wants us to know that it is in the most desolate human spaces that God generates light and love and faith and hope. That, as the author of Psalm 139 put it so eloquently, there is no place, even the darkest depths of hell, where God and God-light are not. Jesus demonstrates the impetus of God to generate hope even in the darkest and deepest of trials.

And as bearers of Christ and Christ light we are called to do so likewise.

40 years after the late Alex McCowan’s recitation of Mark’s gospel account a new actor, Stefan Smart, has been doing the same thing. Like his predecessor, Smart has performed to sellout crowds around the world. Smart has gone a step further and produced a film version of his recitation. That too has taken many secular festivals by storm. It is our task to learn how in a sceptical age we two might be bearers of the shear urgent unstoppable energy of Christ light.