because we glimpse

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 28^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

1 John 7: 7-21

Psalm 22: 25-31

John 15.18

If you will bear with me while I become a little introspective, standing almost in the tradition of testimony, when I came to faith after a few years of grumpy adolescent atheism, I moved briefly in the sort of circles that spend a lot of time condemning people to hell. Such branches of Christianity will spend a whole lot of time focused on the branches that in Jesus’ simple metaphor are trimmed from the vine and cast into the fire.

Such branches of Christianity cannot, if you’ll excuse the almost-pun, see the wood for the trees. The fires of Jesus’ metaphor are to do with gardening and pruning, and not with casting wayward souls into endless torment. If there is anything about purgative fires here it is about finding the parts of our own life that need a little bit of harsh trimming, and not about flinging those with whom we do not agree into sulphuric pits.

I sat, as I hope you can imagine, slightly uneasily with this. I don’t remember the details of the slow transitions that took place thereafter but I know that a large part of them was a remarkable digging into those same writings that we have been travelling through in the weeks since Easter.

We don’t need to be great scholars to realise that the writings that bear the name John are deeply focused on the themes of love and, although the he does not use the word, tenacity. He uses the word “abide” but in the interests of simplicity we’ll set that aside for now. A synonym can be a fine thing.

As a one-time scribbler of poetry, deeply convinced that I was the next James K. Baxter. That was a pipe dream that I eventually surrendered when I faced reality. I discovered anyway that I can’t walk barefoot. But before that I wrote much about love. Lest I lead you astray I was no Shakespeare, nor was my adolescent scribbling or even my early adult scribbling identifiable as love poetry. The greater theme was: “what is love?”

As I also came to dabble in the writings of John, who is of course the recorder of those Jesus words “greater love has no person than this …” I recognise firmly that we are all very early stages apprentices in this profound human narrative.

Allow me to spend the rest of my time here – by which I mean here today, not here in Queenstown for the duration – allow me to spend the rest of the time on 3 brief events of the last 72 hours.

One of the immeasurable privileges of my work is to engage in peak moments of human love. The most obvious form that I’m referring to is of course the privilege of officiating at weddings, or, in this parish, the frequent renewal of wedding vows. Just yesterday I was able to take part in two of these occasions. Being very even handed one was at Saint Paul’s and one at Saint Peter’s. In the first a very western couple, from the United States, renewed vows that they had made 11 or so years before. Amidst the tears and the laughter of the very laid-back but I think holy ceremony their love for one another, for life, and for life together was irrepressible.

Later yesterday I was once again able to be a part of the blessing of a Chinese marriage. I make no secret of the fact that I wrestle with these occasions and have even asked couples after the event whether it is the faith dimension of a church blessing or the romantic Europeanization of love that brings them across oceans and continents for a blessing. Yet almost every time I take one of these moments and do my best to breathe something of God into the clutter of cameras and candles I see love, writ large across each bride’s eager face (and of course dare I admit it, the groom’s patient forbearance).

Yet love is love, that slogan must used at the moment particularly as we wrestle with understanding forms of love that were once beyond the pale. In the church we wrestle with these questions of love knowing that we, in our drawing of lines in the sand may have been more wrong than right. Yet having floated that boat I’m going to leave it adrift on a sea of unanswered questions.

But there was one other incredibly privileged moment these past 72 hours as I found myself, unmerited, marching at the front of the Anzac day parade in Arrowtown. I am, you may remember, a part of the generation of the 70s who watched such gatherings with misguided near-contempt. It was only in the decade or so after that that I began to recognize the courage and the sacrifice that had been entailed in soldiers heading to the other side of the world to fight in a war that none of us could understand. In doing so they, voluntarily or otherwise absolutely committed themselves to the cause, and to the belief that their horrors were experienced in the struggle for a better world for those who followed after them.

As I marched this year, and as I spoke – and might I say far less eloquently than the young high school student who was the chosen speaker – but as I marched and as I spoke I felt deeply that sense that we were there, and we were able to march and remember and feel so freely, because of great sacrifices made in the past. Each year I feel a deep unworthiness: not only have I never struggled in trenches or brutal warfare, but to the best of my knowledge none of my forebears have either – though I acknowledge my cousins-once-removed in Australia who dedicated their working lives to peacetime military service.

These thoughts are (after I’d have to admit another hectic several days) rather random thoughts, but not random, without purpose. For the source of the materials that bear the name John again and again dares to say that where love is God is. And where God is love is. The reverse of that is more nuanced; where hate is God is too, but there God patiently waits and perhaps waits long beyond the reach of time.

Jesus sets down a difficult command: love one another as I have loved you. To a person we have fallen short of his command. But to a person we have seen glimpses, little vignettes in our lives and the lives of those around us that reveal something of that love.

We are called to embody the lessons of those vignettes. For me this past week the irrepressible love of an American couple renewing their vows, the whimsical happiness of a Chinese couple wanting to express something that their original ceremony did not, the immeasurable love of those who allowed their lives to be shattered because they wanted a better world for their descendants. These vignettes give us some glimpse of the task Jesus entrusts us to.

It is my privilege to have those glimpses but you too will know of many similar moments and glimpses of immeasurable love, God’s greatest gift.

lighten our darkness

 

after a long week, with minimal time to prepare, a few random and tangled thoughts about sheep, rams especially, about tragedy, and about stained glass windows. 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 21st) 2024

 

READINGS

 

1 John 3: 16-24

Psalm 23

John 10:11-18

You may be aware of the tragedy this past week, when a Waitākere couple were killed by a rogue ram. Our hearts go out to the next of kin and to all affected by this rare and devastating event.

How far removed this terrible Waitākere event is from the imagery that Jesus is seeking to invoke as he describes himself in terms of Middle Eastern imagery of shepherding. Or is it? The Waitākere event in all its starkness can remind us how cautious we must be in reading scriptures set down two thousand years ago. How vulnerable we are. How vulnerable the gospel and its Christ is.

In the harsh world in which Jesus was living and teaching was far removed from the romantic Europeanised scenes of Jesus, wearing an Anglican alb, walking home through meadows with a lamb on his shoulders. It was a world of danger.

Jesus was not of talking about rams turning feral and killing people. He was speaking of shepherds protecting sheep in a harsh region. There, wolves and lions were a constant threat, and sheep breeds were as tough as nails. 

That world produced brutal instinctive forces, forces that surfaced in the Waitākere tragedy. That tragedy turns our reading upsidedown. 

That horror was possible because sheep in their ancestry had to coexist with fierce predators. Every farmer recognizes the dangers inherent in animals, no matter where they stand on the food chain. My last funeral in one of my parishes was of a farmer killed in a cattle crush by a bull turned rogue. 

Jesus in this “I am” saying places himself in contexts far closer to the protective instincts of feral Waitākere rams than to the romantic scenes of stained glass windows and children’s bibles. He protects - they protect. They protect by attacking a perceived threat - who were in fact the protectors and care-givers of the ram. Life convolutes - and sometimes in convolution we may struggle to find meaning.   

As European Christians – most of us here – we need to put aside our accrued imagery. I’m reminded of the lessons that Anne and I learned in the Northern Territory, as we listened to and read the experiences of Aboriginal people, common to First Nations people from around the colonised world.

As missionaries came to the indigenous people and spoke of shepherds and sheep there was a complete breakdown in communication. What was a shepherd? What was a sheep? What was the relationship between the two?

If I were to speak of this parable in some of the more remote but still europeanised parts of the world, in which stock lived in isolated and vulnerable contexts, I would probably illustrate the shepherding of and by Jesus in terms of Maremma dogs. Originally from ancient Europe, they bond with and fiercely protect vulnerable flocks and herds. They indeed will be prepared to lay down their life for the sheep, though it would have to be a ferocious predator that overcame a Maremma.

Some farmers are rediscovering the benefits of these dogs, as they live out in the paddocks with the flocks, day in, day out. There they reduce if not eliminate predatory carnage. They are not pets, at least in their natural state, but are strongly effective tools.  The ram became the Maremma in thie Waitākere tragedy. But ram got it wrong. The victims were his and his herd's protectors and care givers.

"I am the good Maremma." It does no harm to remind ourselves of the very different world in which Jesus taught. The killer rams with which I opened these thoughts are far closer to the realities of Jesus’ pastoral world than are our stained-glass depictions.

We need to be careful how we interpret and depict ancient scriptures. I am the fierce protective ram. Two years ago I was far less tragically bolted down a hillside by a protective ram; I had not seen him in the paddock next door, where I had gone to rescue a ewe tangled in fencing wire. My good intentions bore no weight with the protective ram. 

It was no new experience for me; as a small child I shared my life with a pet lamb who became a pet ram, and while he was harmless to most people he did take a liking to knocking yours truly over and reducing him to tears on more than one occasion. I remember Jamie with fear and trembling!

I do not want to minimise the tragedy of the Waitākere family so devastated by the loss of not one but two loved ones. But I want to emphasise how raw and rough was the world around Jesus as he spoke of his responsibilities towards his people, towards you and towards me and towards countless others.

The threats faced by those who have chosen the ways of justice and light and life and hope proclaimed in the gospels were not worlds of fluffy ducks, but worlds of all too real risks. In my comfortable world I have to remember that there are countless Christ-bearers, and other justice-bearers, who speak out to proclaim their faith in Christ, or commitment to justice, whether Christ-based or not, at great peril.

Reading this passage in the shadow of the Waitākere tragedy has led me to a place of convolution. The ram becomes the wolf and the would-be care-givers, looking after the flock, become the victims, and lose their lives. Metaphors are dangerous places, but what we must extrapolate is that the Christ who proclaims himself our shepherd will be with us even in the most vulnerable times, the most tenuous and dark circumstances. That is immeasurably good news. But there is inherent in this passage an extra challenge, and that is that we too are called to be advertisements of, bearers of the strength of the shepherd Christ.

I have confessedly led you around in circles as I try to tease meaning in the 21^st century from a profound ancient image. It is an image much watered down by over-use and over-familiarity. The meaning is upsidedown in the light of the Waitākere tragedy. Perhaps all we can say is that the good shepherds themselves were killed in this tragedy; and for that there is precedent. 

The passage works in many ways, culturally dependent. I am, says Jesus the fierce defender-shepherd. I am also, says Jesus, no tame pet. I lay down my life. I go to the darkest places. Our task sometimes is to find that light, bear that light, be that light. 

inconvenient impossible things

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 7^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

1 John 3: 1-7

Psalm 4

Luke 24: 36b-48

I possibly mentioned in passing a week ago, and I certainly have from time to time, a book written by an Australian theologian, a book entitled The Contrast Society of Jesus. The author, Alan Walker, was adamant that the community of Christians should be outstanding by its commitment to compassion and justice, both at a one-to-one level and at a church-to-society level. It has been a long time since I read the book, and I probably should do so again, but his thoughts have never left me.

Also a week ago I mentioned that the author of the little letters of John towards the end of the New Testament as we have it, was struggling because he sensed that the Christ community was losing the quality of its love for one another within the community and its compassion and love for those outside the community.

It could be said that both Alan Walker and John the Evangelist had been singing to themselves that well known if rather often too complacent song “they will know we are Christians by our love.”

The Easter season is hardly the time for us to beat ourselves up with the question “will they?” For now, I think we are offered the great sense of joy that we are loved by the one who some would refer to cynically as our invisible friend.  He, Jesus, we know experientially, or at least believe to be the one who transforms the universal obscenity of death, and its close sibling, grief. We grieve, yes, and we can also be faintly annoyed at our own mortality from time to time – although the prickly Anglican Dean of Dublin, Jonathan Swift masterfully pointed out in Gulliver’s Travels that immortality in our somewhat limited and dare I say it decomposing bodies is not an attractive option.

So we have our moments of grief, but we call to mind especially in this Easter season that we grieve, when we do, and as Paul put it, “not as a people without hope.” Rather “we believe that Jesus died and rose again,” and “even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.” But there is something of a package deal in this transformation of death. Because we are also challenged to believe that the package comes with that other great inconvenience, judgement. More of that perhaps another time, though I would not entirely dismiss it.

But we live with this unfathomable future dimension. Many do in our society, although it will be expressed much more ethereally, as passing over to another side, and certainly any thought of a judging God is rapidly suppressed. Even the words death and dying are considered in most quarters to be far too hot to handle.

Yet, we, with the early Christians are called to believe in the unbelievable. That’s awkward. Or as one somewhat cynical former viewer of our gospel conversations put it the other day as they unsubscribed from our Gospel Conversations of gospel faith, “I don’t want to hear about people popping out of graves.”

No matter how great our doubts, and I confess I'm not an easy believer, I nevertheless do believe that the gospel story is challenging us precisely to believe in an empty tomb, and not for that matter to believe in a stolen body or a cooked-up story. The inconvenience of those resurrection narratives!

I say this because the New Testament Letter of John and the Gospel according to Luke that we have read from today simply take us to those two challenges – neither of which I can claim to have lived up to. Which does not mean incidentally that I'm at this moment going to, as one cleric infamously did in the North Island many decades ago, ceremoniously disrobe myself and exit the room.

By no means, as Paul often said in his writings. No, what it does mean is that I am going to hold to, (or perhaps be held to by the Spirit of God), belief in things akin to the white Queen’s “six impossible things before breakfast.” And because I am held by those six impossible beliefs, or however many it is for me as I remain embraced by the grace and love of God, because I am held by these impossible and inconvenient dimensions of resurrection hope, and of Christ-impelled love and compassion and justice, I will continue to stumble along this strange path of faith much as those first Christians did after they encountered the events that we know as the resurrection appearances of Jesus.

It would of course have been much easier for the gospel writers to mutter something about a ghost, or a social cause that Jesus exemplified that needed to be continued. They didn’t. They invited and continue to invite ridicule by telling stories of a highly tangible if initially unrecognisable Christ, entering closed rooms, eating on beaches, breathing in nostrils, even barbecuing a few fish. They were adamant that the resurrection was a very tangible event, as ridiculous to their first hearers as it is to most of ours.

And while I find it from time to time faintly frustrating, I simply accept that I have to subscribe to that inconvenience, and because of the impact that inconvenience and the teachings and actions of Jesus have on my life I must continue to do my endlessly fallible best to live by acts of compassion and justice and love in the world in which God has placed me.

It is by subscribing to and acting upon these weird and wonderful invitations to …  commissionings to have belief in and action on behalf of Jesus of Nazareth that we may together be in some small way, in our small microcosm of the world, be a contrast Society of Jesus, by the grace of God touching and enabling the transformation of lives around us.

community of love?

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 7^th) 2024 

READINGS

1 John 1: 1 – 2:2

Psalm 133

John 20: 19-31

                                                                          (photo used with parental permission)

To understand John’s letters in the New Testament I believe we need a little bit of background. It probably dates me as a theological student, but I would make no secret of the fact that I am most persuaded by the writings of Roman Catholic scholar Raymond Brown. He argues that the four writings we know as John share a common source. That is the eyewitness accounts of the disciple described cautiously in the fourth gospel as “the one whom Jesus loved.”

It is a beautiful endearing title, and while I'm not one of those that find strands of homosexual longing at any point in the biblical record – that is not an argument for or against recognition of homosexual love today – I find it clear nevertheless that the source of these writings had a remarkably deep relationship with the one we and he call Lord. In the fourth gospel the author, or perhaps more likely oral source of the material written down, could clearly claim a deep knowledge of the interior working of the mind of Jesus. Personally I do not see that as any sort of mystical, in a loose sense, far less sexual, bond. I do see it as closely akin to the relationship between the minds of those who have worked in deeply entwined encounter, such as those in an international sporting team, or those who have served together in military units. Of that I probably need say no more here.

The source of this material that we know as John and one John 2 John 3 John, knew clearly, as Paul does in his writings, that love was the absolute embodiment of all the teachings and actions of Jesus. That love of course was no romantic, though it might include that, no sexual, no limited form of love at all. It was the love that came to be known as agape. I think it is fair to say it is the love that in the Māori language, is aroha, or even arohanui, inexpressibly great love incorporating justice and discipline and work as well as warm feelings of an enriched heart.

For John, as we see in Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, love is the very essence of God, of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and as such should be embodied in the life and witness of the followers of Jesus Christ. This is the love – and its corollary “peace,”  – that the risen Lord imparts in the lives of the gathered disciples, post-Easter. Jesus bestows on them the gift of the one foreshadowed throughout the gospel account as Comforter, called alongside, docked deep in the lives of those who are following Jesus. Docked as deeply in the lives of followers of Jesus as they permit. Again: Paul and John alike are a wakeup to the extent to which we can blot out the gentle voice of divine love amidst the white noise of our busy and often self-centred lives.

Raymond Brown argues that the beloved disciple went on after the resurrection, never denying or marginalising the centrality of the resurrection, to found a community of believers somewhere in the Mediterranean realms that we know as the Middle East, but which in his time was just one more outpost of the often corrupt Roman Empire.

In an attempt to make this Jesus community a counterculture to empire corruption, John emphasised Jesus’ rule and embodiment of love. To what extent did this community emulate and practice the love revealed in the story, and behind the story the life and teachings and actions of Jesus, the one he provocatively calls “Word made flesh”?

Sadly, like most of us, the members of John’s community were human. Jesus breathed peace and love and justice into the nostrils of his followers in the locked room that he entered. To be recipients of this love, this perfect love, is to dwell in the light and to be persons and a people in whom there is no darkness at all. Perhaps as an old man the Beloved Disciple had become separated from his community, but somehow he learns that all is going wrong, and in the little epistles 1, 2, and 3 John we find him, like Paul, for example in his letters to the Corinthians, becoming increasingly strident as he realises that they are not, as perhaps we sometimes are not, the people of peace and love and justice they were called to be.

By the end of John’s writing career (as it were) he is running out of words. Like Paul again, he longs to be with his people to attempt to correct them as they fall short of the standards that he expects of them. “Beloved, do not imitate what is evil but imitate what is good,” he writes. “Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.”

What then for us? Despite the recipients of the letters of Paul and John alike clearly falling short of the writers’ expectations, the letters survive. We would say that as part of the workings, miraculous workings, of God’s, Spirit, that same Comforter who moved on the face of the deep at creation and was shall we say re-breathed into the nostrils of the disciples in the locked room. That we have the writings we call scripture is a gift of God. In the case of Paul and John alike the author probably gave up the task of writing feeling that his communities had fallen apart – much I might add as we might think the church we have loved is falling apart in the 21st century. 

Yet we have those writings.

In the mystery of God, and probably without the knowledge of the human authors of our scriptures, those writings came to be handed down to guide us, in itself a sign that ultimately they guided their first recipients. Someone, perhaps several someones, treasured the writings, handed them on, and we have them, as Christians have had them for 2000 years. Like the first recipients we have sometimes ignored, abused or belittle them, yet still they speak.

We too are a horribly imperfect people. Were the Beloved Disciple composing a letter to us today it might be strident too. Nevertheless our task over and again is to allow the piercing light of Christ, the risen Christ, to penetrate our own darkness – which because we’re probably not terribly important compared to a Trump or Putin, is more a fuzzy greyness than true darkness. Nevertheless we are called to allow Christlight to penetrate our darkness individually and collectively so that we too can be bearers of justice, and peace, and hope, and light – and more – in the communities into and through which the Spirit guides us.