SERMON
PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,
ORDINARY
SUNDAY 10 (June 9th) 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.
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