storm, be still

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 12 (June 23^rd) 2024

 

READINGS

 

Psalm 9: 11-14

2 Corinthians 6:1-13

Mark 4: 35-41

As I read this famous scene from the gospels I am time and time again staggered by its vividness, either as a metaphor or as an actual, demonstrable if you like. event that took place on a like in the Holy Land 2000 years ago.

When it comes to reading these great nature miracles I will tend to lean to metaphor, and yet these events must be deeply consistent with the experience of those who saw and knew Jesus in the flesh.

So I have long since discarded the idea that the miracles were merely metaphor, not least because it seems to me the biblical writers are telling us that something greater than our comprehension is happening here.

So whether or not we were able to time travel and grab the weather details for that 24 hour period in Middle Eastern meteorology, there is something clearly vast going on here in the Jesus story. And, strangely enough, there is an even greater focus on the story of the disciples slow awakening to Jesus.

The critical ingredient of the passage is the overwhelming fear that those who are still awake in the boat are experiencing. I mentioned  only a couple of weeks ago, that in recent years I have experienced a seismic shift in perspective on world affairs. This was to do with the schematic conversion of truth into lies and lies into truth, and since that time I have found myself in a shaky “I don’t know who to trust anymore” world.

Almost.

Prior to that, as someone who worked in media, I more or less trusted reputable media sources. I don’t of course mean disreputable sources like the infamous New Zealand Truth newspaper or the more sensational and breathy tabloids of the Daily Mail genre. As a reader it is always our task to evaluate, to test information around us on the balance of probability. Aliens probably did not eat my cat and there probably isn't a tunnel through which children are smuggled from the USA by paedophile rings.

The balance of probability is a difficult thing to speak about when confronted by Jesus in a boat, stilling a storm. But here is a deeper philosophical probability. CS Lewis refers to a “deeper magic” and it is hinted at here. If there is a God who is the source of all creation, then that God at least has the option of stilling storms, of feeding thousands, of curing illness.

That it has not been my experience is a litmus test to which I need sometimes to hold lightly. Occasionally, in any case, we need to remind ourselves that there is enough food on planet earth to feed 8 billion people. There is just not enough compassion.

Being a news junkie, there have been times in recent years that I have become deeply fearful for the state of the world. Prior to that, destructive chaos was an abstraction, one that I naively thought had begun to be laid to rest with the cessation of Cold War, the crumbling of walls, and the steady dismantling, so it seemed, of injustices.

How wrong I was.

I now live in a world where most days I find myself in a boat on a lake during a storm, metaphorically speaking. (I need to add that since I drive along the shores of a magnificent lake each day).

The disciples were frightened by physical manifestations of nature. Fear is one of those words that covers an entire range or feeling. The disciples in this scene undergo a transition in fear, from what we can assume was terror for their lives to deep, immeasurable awe at their experience of Jesus’ authority over the elements.

Once I had come to believe in a creator God I had to remind myself to be open to the possibility that God has mastery over creation. That mastery unfortunately is not at my beck and call, and I cannot, on demand, expect God to still a storm or to provide me with 153 fish, or the infamous Mercedes-Benz of Janis Joplin’s acerbic song.

Mark wants us to know that the God we experience in worship and fellowship and prayer and meditation in scripture and in nature is far greater than we can ever imagine.

The disciples were shell-shocked, in a sense, when they saw the authority revealed in Jesus. But this is no longer the terror of the elements, but the deep, immeasurably deep awe of encountering divine authority. Although I never went to Sunday school I believe children used to sing a song that says “my God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do.”

I have loathed that song for years, and still do. Yet I am forced to admit its truth once I have admitted the existence of God. But God doesn’t do dramatic things on demand, and such an elusive God is an inconvenience to my thought processes. God can, God has, God does, though never on demand. God will do the inconceivable.

Even prayer is not demand, no matter how heartfelt.

Mark wants us to grasp one other idea. He wants us to notice that this Jesus in whom the fullness of God is revealed is utterly immersed in human experience. He may be confident enough to doze through the terrifying storm, but later, in the crucifixion scenes, we’ll see that he too is not impervious to the horrors of suffering.

Mark wants to hold those two ideas in tension: Jesus utterly divine, and Jesus utterly immersed in the whole range of horrors experienced by humankind –  indeed I would add, by what I shall call “naturekind.”

Mark’s account of the gospel will ultimately go on to explain that it is precisely because the unmoved mover in the back of the boat is willing to become the victim on the cross. He is willing to become the history-transforming saviour. He is even willing to entrust his story to a terrified group of women fleeing an empty tomb on Easter morning. He does so because the integrity of the resurrection is so great that lives have been changed and hope has dwelt in human hearts ever since.’

so help me god

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 10 (June 9^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

Ps 138

2 Cor 4:12 - 5:1

Mark 3:20-25

 

At the risk of doing something that I say we should never do, that is to say pinpointing or limiting God’s plans, I am prepared to say we live in apocalyptic times. For one thing the New Testament is adamant that all time after the resurrection is end time, eschatological time. That’s not quite what I mean; there’s a sense in which apocalyptic time is not quite the same as end time. Nevertheless we have all heard apocalyptic end time preachers telling us that the latest leader of this or that movement or country is the Antichrist. As I say in my first book, he says, boastfully waving a copy for all to see, When I first encountered apocalyptic Christianity I was deeply distressed that the bankcard symbol was indeed three sixes superimposed on each other, and therefore the mark of the beast. It was also jolly useful when out shopping.

But no, I am suggesting that this is just one of those apocalyptic eras that humankind has faced since long before Jesus. The earliest apocalyptic writings were in any case the book of Daniel, which although it was the last book of the canonical Hebrew scriptures to be written, was pre-Jesus, at least in any earthly sense. And as I am wont to say, there have been many apocalyptic eras ever since. The dictatorship of the emperor Nero, the rise of Black Death, and let’s not forget that western perspectives are not everything; the most devastating disaster in human toll was the 1931 Chinese flooding when four million people lost their lives. And that’s before I begin to count calamities engineered by humanity itself. While the impact of the Chernobyl disaster must include both living death and terminal death, and is therefore notionally different, it is believed to have destroyed the lives of over 7 million people.

The man who I consider to be the greatest theologian of the last 70 years, Jürgen Moltmann, certainly the single most influential figure in my quite unimportant thinking, died last week aged 98. Central to his thought was in part the realisation that since the Trinity bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert humanity has had the potential to destroy itself and its global living space, its planet. So far we haven’t and in recent years other concerns such as global warming have rather pushed the threat of nuclear Holocaust to the back of the minds of most of us. Though in the face of escalating tension, or at least not deescalating tension, between the East and the West the memory of nuclear threat is resurfacing in our consciousness.

In a sermon at the time of my reinstatement as Dean of Waiapu, reinstatement that I took up for one Sunday only on legal and matrimonial advice, I suggested that the greatest ingredient of a new surge in apocalyptic symptoms was the enshrining of lies as truth and truth as lies. Living in Australia for many years I had come accustomed to the cynical and destructive differentiation of then Prime Minister John Howard between core promise and non core promise, and wondered what that meant for truth. But from the moment that a person, who I had never previously heard of to my amusement, rode an aesthetically horrendous golden elevator into an ostentatious lobby in 2015, the reversal of truth and falsehood has been deeply enshrined in political and social dialogue.

Years before that as a sort of hippie groupie atheist I had enshrined in my consciousness the plaintiff line of a Neil Young rejection song (the opposite of a love song): “I don't know who to trust anymore.” I guess I have been a fairly gullible person most of my life always erring on the side of trust. When dismissed from my post on the basis of lies and fabrications in 2016, before my reinstatement and my first coming to you, I had found the hardest ingredient in getting up each day to be the dark thought that I no longer trusted the institution that I had served for over 30 years (at that stage). But I chided myself severely when I realised that I was far, astronomically far from the first to suffer that experience, and that in fact I had interviewed and come to know well many victims of ecclesiastical abuse in various forms. One of the great tenets of my faith is that none of us is immune from human fallibility perpetrated either by ourselves or by others around us, either by us on others, or others on us. Still, “I don’t know who to trust anymore” is one of the most plaintive cris de cœur we encounter, a dark mantra.

Scholars have spent much ink and wasted much time trying to define what it is that Jesus meant by the sin against the Holy Spirit. Anne remembers the deep concern she had as a young teenage Christian fearing that she or someone around her might inadvertently commit this sin. It is a fascinating saying, and we can fairly safely assume that Jesus didn’t mean some sort of accidental sin that we might have committed and not known about, and indeed in our rites of confession we even say that the sins which we commit deliberately are placed into God’s hands for forgiveness. The context of the saying makes it clear that some deeply destructive antagonism to the love-purposes of God is intended, and indeed in some of my own writings I have suggested that this unimaginable sin is an impossible possibility, and neither more nor less than Jesus’ warning that we do need to keep a fairly stern eye on navigational beacons through life.

I do want to suggest though that turning truth into lies and lies into truth comes very close to the essence of unforgivable sin. The predatory actions of clergy, but not only clergy, preying upon and destroying the lives of people in their care comes very close indeed to unforgivable sin. The institutional conversion of truth into lies, and lies into truth, the pillorying of incontrovertible truth as “fake news,” so shifts the boundaries of decency and society’s navigational aids that we are left with utter chaos and despair. Trust is dismantled and along with trust: hope, light, justice, even love, are turned to dust.

We live then in apocalyptic times. Not necessarily the apocalyptic time, though possibly that too. For the first 30 or so years of my preaching apocalyptic remained a distant intellectual concept. I suggest that from the time of that deeply anti aesthetic ride on an elevator there has been something of a shift in our human state.

This may not be irreparable. And you and I are not going to be able to change the course of history. We are however called to ensure that our lives, by the grace and help of God reflect nothing but truth and integrity, and that remains our task no matter how small and unimportant we and our immediate world may be. And as you will note from time to time in liturgy, even that is blessed by the rider, “so help me God.”

So as Jesus addressed his often-bewildered disciples and other followers and spoke of the binding of a strong man, spoke of a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, spoke of a love greater than that even of mother and brother and sisters, he was telling us something that remains important even 21 centuries later. He was telling us to hold tenaciously to the navigational beacons revealed in his life and death, his teachings, his resurrection, and what we call his coming again and will shortly acknowledge in the words of the creed.

And in this always, always we proceed imploring the help of God.

vignettes of divine love

 

(Somewhat Stream of consciouness) 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY (June 2^nd) 2024

 

READINGS

 

Ps 139:1-6,13-18

2 Cor 4:5-12

Mark 2:23-3:6

  

Every third year, when we journey more or less systematically through the Gospel According to Mark, we come out of a long period of dwelling in the Gospel According to John. We return to the Marcan story of Jesus and find a much less ethereal, a much more earthy narrative. We find ourselves with hungry bellies striding through a grain field. 

I’m presuming the field pictured is not so much wheat but something immediately palatable for humans? May we compare it to an orchard or a vineyard, if we’re going to receive the same cultural nuances? I remember once hitchhiking around the North Island eating only what my hitchhiking buddy and I could find by the roadside. It’s that kind of a scene.

We find too a man with a withered hand, in a culture in which there was no safety net, a culture in which he would find himself pushed to the friendless fringes of society. It’s not a pleasant place to be.

Either Jesus or Mark then goes on to do something a little strange. He somewhat twists a Hebrew scriptures text. Spurious details about King David plucking grain on the Sabbath as he and his companions were suffering what we can assume was considerable hunger. 

The story in fact is not quite accurate. Jesus - or perhaps Mark, was remembering in a hurry, Abiathar was not the high priest, and David was alone. The gospel narratives, all the scriptures, were not word processed in heaven. My former ministry educator colleague Dr Deborah Broome suggests that at this point Jesus was testing his opponents, a moment of “spot the deliberate mistake.” I'm not entirely convinced, though it is plausible. How well, Dr Broome challenges us, do we know our scriptures? I confess I, without a commentary, would never have known that. 

But the greater point is about faith-based legalism. Interpreters of Jesus' time, interpreters of the Hebrew scriptures, did in fact allow for activities to take place on the Sabbath, where there was dire need. We will see Jesus address this issue again.

While I did not have a particularly religious upbringing I do remember my mother recalling her quite strict, rather Brethren upbringing. For her chikdhood only faith-based songs and games could distract a family from the solemnities of the so-called Sabbath. God was not a bundle of laughs.

I am unconvinced that Sunday ever was intended to be the Sabbath. Yet I agree with my colleague Dr Broome that humanity and indeed God’s earth need sabbaths. We need to rest. We need to dwell in the presence of God’s renewing spirit, focused rest, the original idea of the Sabbath. 

Sunday though should remain the joyous new day of a new creation. Perhaps more of that another day, but I am very much influenced by that glorious Roman Catholic approach:  go to Mass on Sunday (or even Saturday evening as that counts as Sunday) and then you can do what you like for the rest of the day – er – within reason.

 Touch base with God, give thanks, and the day is gifted back to you.

But for a moment let's emphasise the degree to which Jesus, and Mark to the extent that he is narrating the Jesus story, confront destructive religiosity. Where faith comes into conflict with human compassion and decency, there surely we have lost our compass points? Are the legalisms that I hold to tenaciously in my faith practise obstacles to others who may wish to encounter the love and compassion and manaakitanga, the embracing hospitality of God? 

 I have been thrilled at the way people in this parish have accommodated, for example, a group of young people coming to us and worshipping with us without any knowledge that bringing their Starbucks coffee with them was not traditionally acceptable in Anglican liturgical practice!

Who said? 

I remember when I was a young curate in Melbourne, the stern glares afforded to my eldest daughter, now approaching 40, when she dared to move around, not even noisily, during a Sunday Eucharist. Who, literally in Jesus’ name, decided that children should be seen and not heard, and, I should add, seen only insofar as they were sitting still and not moving? 

The origin of the infamous saying incidentally is 15th century England, and there it should remain. Like my once Brethren mother, forced to play only with Noah’s ark on the Sabbath, this stern censoriousness is not the teaching of Christ or Christ’s scriptures. Neither Christ nor his scriptures have anything to say about Starbucks coffee (though my own opinion is that the youth could have chosen better sources!).

Jesus confronts legalism, confronts a society that leaves people hungry – we’re not talking mildly peckish here but dangerously hungry. Jesus confronts a society, that by definition was religious, a society that leaves people excluded by physical infirmity. We must look at ways in which we do just that. 

I have been proud too of the way in which our parish accommodated, as I have said before, our rough sleepers. I was proud in a previous parish of the way in which that faith community accommodated and loved a profoundly autistic adult and the unpredictability of his behaviour. Vignettes of divine love.

As we return to Mark’s gospel-telling, we are asked simply to look at ourselves, to ensure that we address ways in which we might, I might, hinder people’s journey into God. Obviously I will wave the most conspicuous question of sexuality, but there are many others too. Dress codes, literacy codes, the unspoken mores of middle classness that are the familiar and comfortable world for me and probably most of us. 

I’m proud of what I observe in a parish able to put so many of these false-nice attitudes aside. 

I only hope and pray this in the months to come we find more and more ways to embrace those, even, in the relatively privileged Whakatipu, who are pushed to the fringes of society.