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.