Cloudy God, Fast God

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 17^th) 2024

 

READINGS

Hebrews 5: 1-10

Psalm 119:9-16

John 12: 20-33

 

[The wondrous thing about the small slice of the letter or, I suspect, sermon to the Hebrews that we have read from [at St. Peter’s] is that it can be made to mean almost anything. There is a long-standing tradition when persons are ordained of delivering them a congratulatory card, reminding them that they are “a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” 

The "who/what" of Melchizedek aside, beyond a fleeting Hebrew Scripural mention, tbere is a truth in the cards doled out to neo-phyte clergy. Yes, in orthodox theology that are priest forever in some way, but they were on the day before their ordination as well. The English and Latin languages have done us a great disservice, for different Greek words for priesthood have slid into Latin and English usage, but I can safely say that it is the intention of the church that those of us who wear our collars back to front are not priests in any different way to the way in which you the people of God are priests, and that is the priesthood into which we are baptised.

We are of course baptised into Jesus and he fulfils the priesthood that the author of Hebrews is cryptically writing of. You and I in exactly the same way, regardless of our neck apparel, participate in that priesthood. There will be more of that on other occasions, but basically the unfortunate English word describing the “priesthood” into which I am ordained and you are not has nothing to do with the priesthood of Melchizedek.

But although I primarily want to talk about the gospel reading, and briefly at that, it is always worth checking the ways in which we can distort scripture. In the gospel reading the focus is the glorification of the true priest. There the word in Greek is hieros, from which we get hierarchy, the ordained priesthood with unfortunate collars is depicted by the  word presbuteros, from which akmost ironically we get the word Presbyterian. 

I remember well my head of seminary thumping the desk and exclaiming there must be no hieros, no hierarchy in the church.

But of course there is in our denomination. It’s just that there shouldn’t be. And I’ve made that clear as mud. Enough.]

What is of this glorification of which Jesus speaks? Very little in John’s account of the gospel is weightless, and  “glory” is one of his key words. John depicts a scene foreshadowing in which God extends divine relationship with the Jews to a relationship of God  with all people.

Most of us belong in that category.

It is outsiders who have come longing to see Jesus. It is to primaril them that Jesus addresses his thoughts on glorification.

“Glory” in the Hebrew scriptures was the sign and prerogative of God. Jesus begins talking to the Greeks about it in the context of prediction of his own suffering and death. Something very strange is going on. To the Greeks the concept of a God suffering was impossible. To the Jews, as we will see in Paul’s writings, the possibility of God’s death on what Paul calls a tree, a wooden cross, was obscene.

Jesus here sets out to identifies himself with God and God with impossibility, even obscenity.

We will be doing a lot of hard work in our liturgy over the next two weeks. Next week we will, though for most of the last 20 centuries the church has forgotten it, look at the way in which we have sought God in the wrong places. 

Certainly, yes, the Hebrew scriptures speak of the glory of God, the shekinah, in a pillar of fire by night and cloud by day, majestic and terrifying. As I was wonderfully reminded during my all too short sojourn in the Northern Territory, there is little that is more majestic than cumulonimbus clouds soaring tens of thousands of metres into the air. Bright light of any sort in the night sky, such as the terrifying grandeur of a volcanic eruption, or God forbid the towering inferno of a high rise building caught alight, are a deeply unsettling sight

Yet Jesus turns the gaze of the Greeks and Jews alike elsewhere. Next Sunday we will enact the desire to see him enter our world and overthrow corruption. If I can find some palm branches in time, we will at least symbolically cast them before his feet, as he comes to our place, comes as a conqueror. Then he will turn that our expectations upside down, for he will come in peace, and will continue in death.

Even the great passing miracle of the resurrection which we will finally encounter on Easter day will be something no newspaper of the time, no cameras, no human eye could capture. God is too fast to be captured, as the poet R. S. Thomas reminds us.

We have much work to do these next two weeks, as we journey towards the moment in which Jesus is lifted up from the earth and begins the whisper that he is drawing all people – people far beyond the boundaries that we like to set – to him.

God does not carry a flag

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,
FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT
(March 10^th) 2024

 

READINGS

Numbers 21: 4-9

Psalm 107:1-8

John 3: 14-21

 

In a number of editions of the bible the probable sayings of Jesus are  marked in red. By doing this edir=tors in once sesese helpful, in that they, with some guesswork, separate Jesus from the editors of his and narrators of his life. The process was somewhat spurious, but it can help us generate the remarkable vision of Jesus from the increasingly restrctibe frames of his followers. That was not the intention of the editors!

But if we reconize that there are both Jesus satings the narators' saying in the text then it can soon be seen that the overall emphasis of Jesus is that of welcome and embrace, rather than rejection and exclusion that has so often been the narrative of Christians.

As it happens it is that insight at least in part that gave rise to one of the more significant theological works of recent decades, when Croation theologian Miroslav Volf wrote his influential volume Exclusion and Embrace. Volf studied under my own favourite theologian, Jürgen Moltmann. I tell you all this not to show off but to put this family as it were of interpreters into a context.

Moltmann and Volf alike were exposed to human darkness. Moltmann was a prisoner of the allies during World War 2, although his reflections were primarily borne not of his experiences as a prisoner but on his recognition of the ways in which his people, especially the German Christian people, failed to see the evil growing in their midst. Volf similarly saw the brutality of Serbo-Croatian racial conflict, and the ethnic cleansing, that, like that of Hitler's pogrom, wreaked havoc and slaughter across his native lands of the former Yugoslavia.

Any theology, indeed any faith, that wrestles with brutality and evil and darkness of this depth is never going to be superficial. Speach of the light of Christ coming into the world after the slaughter of thousands, is obscene. Or it is unless it drives deep into the questions of where God is in times of deepest darkness, and unless it is backed up by prophetic action and attitude.

No comfortable or superficial answer will suffice, and a nine minute reflection in the context of a Eucharist in a comfortable country will not scratch the surface of the surface. 

So I can do little more than to drop hints borrowed from both Moltmann and Volf, though I am an inadequate and superficial reader of both. But in the face of bitter division in the cultures of the europeanized world, the internal conflict growing in the United States, the brutal conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the seemingly endless bitter hatred between Israel and its neighbours, we cannot remain complacent. We cannot speak glibly of a light that shines in darkness.

Moltmann’s unforgettable emphasis when reading the gospels was that the work of the Incarnation, the drawing of God into the heart and breath of humankind, that the extent of that work is clear only when Jesus himself, when God’s own self cries out in absolute Godforsakenness in the darkness of Good Friday.

We will to some extent explore the depth of that cry, the depth of that descent into human hell in the liturgies of Holy Week. We are not there yet. Nevertheless, for those of us who have been exposed to the Christian journey of faith we know it’s coming.

In the light of this descent into the depths of human darkness Moltmann emphasised that there is no place where Christlight does not shine. Lest that be some sort of cosy Linus blanket for us, he emphasised too that there must be no place, no difficulty, into which we should hesitate in bearing Christ light. 

I speak as one who lives a cosy life. I try however to grapple with and respond to the facts that Christ is present in deepest darkest hell holes such as Gaza, or the eastern borders of Ukraine. Present too in the loneliness of victims of police brutality. That brutality that is often championed by those crying out with plastic hypocrisy, "Lord, Lord," or who speak out of obscene Christian nationalism. God does not carry a flag. 

If Christianity in any form does not speak out in the face of brutality and oppression then it is, to borrow a German word, ersatz Christianity, a French word, faux Christianity, or arguably an English word, counterfeit Christianity.

Volf saw this too. As he looked at Christian communities dwelling in the comfort zones of the West he recognised that the popular face of Christianity was one that tended to exclusion, to pushing away the vulnerable, victimised,  oppressed, broken peoples of God’s earth. He saw the persecution and near-genocide of ethnic minorities of the former Yugoslavia. He dared Christians, and continues to do so, to speak out dangerously where there is hatred. To do so whether that hatred be in the name of ethnic otherness, faith-otherness, gender or sexuality otherness, or any other form of darkness.

When Jesus spoke of the Son of Man being lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness, he was speaking of his own vocation to go into the deepest darkest places of human experience. Not for Jesus the cosy complacency of religious surety – which is incidentally the reason I hesitate ever to include “Blessed Assurance” in my hymn lists, however devoted its author and singers mean to be.

No. Jesus was not comfortable with the comfort zones of believers. Jesus was adamant that the Way of the Cross takes us into the darkest ills of human experience.

Given the vicissitudes of birthplace and parentage it is unlikely I and possibly you will follow Jesus into those darkest places. Some of us may experience the personal hells of bereavement, betrayal, loneliness or just common human doubt. It is hard to measure the intensity of hell. But we are the ones who must stand under the judgement that Jesus speaks of,  if we choose to prefer complacency and selfishness to the tough claims of the way of the cross. We are called to open our lives up to embrace, and not exclude, those on the fringes of our s
ociety or of world politics.

Few of us will have to be terribly brave in our lives, and often we will fail, but the story of the New Testament and indeed of the whole biblical record is the story of those who fail yet feel the nudge of God, allow themselves to be picked up, and stumble on again.

On this Lenten journey, as life stands at the moment, few of us are in the places of darkness addressed by a Moltmann or a Volf or a Jesus as he confronted the depths of religious hypocrisy. But we are called to open ourselves up to that possibility, and to the demand of the cross that we live lives of authenticity, of compassion for the suffering and excluded, of embrace to the lonely. And lest I fall into the very cosy complacency of which I speak I too am reminded that I preach not to you but to me and you and us alike.

Glyptapanteles and the Gospel

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,
THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT
(March 3^rd) 2024

 

READINGS

1 Corinthians 1: 18-25

Psalm 19:1-6

John 2: 13-22

 

If I were forced to select one biblical passage by which to live it would be this short excerpt from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. One of the advantages of living by the lectionary is that I don’t get to choose my favourite passages all the time but here you have it.

I’ll come back to that in a moment but as we leap for a week or two from Mark to John I must say a word or two about John. Scholars disagree as to when the Fourth Gospel was written most agree it was very late in the First Century after Christ’s death and resurrection. Perhaps about 100 to 105 of the common era. I am conservative in my understanding of how he came to have this writing, and hold to more or less the traditional belief that the now ageing man John realises that his life is coming to an end, not through martyrdom like most of his peers in the church but through the diminishment of old age. And so with the help of a scribe he sits down the events of his time with Jesus, Jesus Incarnate, and in doing so gives us the extraordinary gift of insight into the workings of the mind and heart of the one that he and we call Lord.

But why is this passage from Paul so important to me? It might be summarised by saying that we never can, nor ever will, nor ever should get our minds around the whole Jesus thing. Paul, frustrated by his beloved Corinthians, is edging towards his characteristic prickliness. Because they are edging towards a smart alecky approach to living out the gospel. Look at us, they’re muttering, aren’t we smart, aren’t we good, aren’t we successful?

Paul’s answer is a resounding “no.” He dares to do something that few of us should ever do. Elsewhere, dealing with recalcitrant believers, he utters the famous words, “it is no longer I but Christ who lives in me.” He meant it with all the weight of first century psychology, which of course didn’t exist.

Some of you may know the horrible example of nature red in tooth and claw, the Glyptapanteles wasp.* It devours its host from the inside out, even going so far as taking over and controlling the host’s brain. Paul doesn’t mean anything quite so lurid but now I’ve given you the image you may well never forget it. Paul has a deep sense that as we open ourselves up to the risen Christ in worship, in scripture, in fellowship and in prayer, we become taken over by Christ love We are controlled not in a zombie manner, but by the extraordinary impetus of God’s will to love, God’s will that we “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.”

The Corinthians are not doing that. So Paul takes the dangerous step of setting himself up as an example. He reminds them that he was not slick in speech, or smart in brain, or rich in pocket. He was dependent utterly on the Christ who had taken over his life. So taken over his life that Paul dared to advertise his own integrity as a counter-image to the Corinthians’ sheer arrogance.

Paul dares to remind the Corinthians that he came to them and persuaded them of the integrity of the gospel by sheer reliance on the risen Christ; by absolute absence of trickery. Not look at me, but look through me and see Christ.

The litmus test I like to use in the life of churches, to evaluate authenticity and Christlikeness is that of “who is this about?” Have I, for example, turned worship into a performance of which I am the star, whether I be pastor, preacher, priest, music leader or, improbably, janitor?

As an aside I’m reminded once again of the time that I carried out an emergency Sunday locum in an Adelaide parish, and found myself talking after the service to a man who had just finished cleaning the toilets. He turned out to be a retired bishop, who of course I had never met before, but who I had long heard of as one of the most authentic and credible bishops in the Australian church.

I strive for excellence in many aspects of worship and Christian life – while being fully aware of my own inadequacy. I do so not in the belief that we should radiate excellence for the sake of excellence, but the belief that if we get our balances right, if we use the gifts that God has given us corporately and individually to the best of our ability, then we can be assured that we are authentically serving the gospel of the risen Lord.

As Jesus entered the temple that he saw as the House of his Father he is furious. He is furious because all the potential of the temple to be a place of awe and mystery and sanctuary and justice has been turned into a maelstrom of commerce and cheap plasticity. Our task is to make sure that our small buildings of God must never become such a thing (and let me add I sincerely believe that they have not). But we must always be on our guard. I want to get our assets right at all times to ensure they serve the proclamation of the gospel, and to that we will work and are working together.

In this time of Lent the equally big if not bigger issue is for us to look deeply within ourselves to remember a sort of benevolent form of the Glyptapanteles wasp; surrender ourselves daily to be transformed in the likeness of love, the likeness of Christ, the likeness of lives lived for others.

 * Okaaaaay ... technically the picture isn't Glyptapanteles, but the best I can do ... and it is a nasty bugger.