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.