embrace the vulnerable

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

AND ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1^st, 2024

 

James 1:17-21

Psalm 26:1-8

Mark 7: 1-2, 6-6, 8

 

 Amongst my suitcase of theological heroes, one is extraordinarily ambivalent. Martin Luther, who I consider something of a lesser hero then Martin Luther King jr., was profound in his understanding of Pauline theology and the significance and achievement of God in Christ, the Incarnation. He was horrible in his anti-Semitism. Not of the kind that some people today refer to as anti-Semitism, that is to say speaking out against some of the atrocities perpetrated by the State of Israel, but of the more traditional, pre-1948 model, whereby anybody with Hebrew or Jewish DNA was somehow deficient or even evil. That is an abhorrent and evil worldview.

I mention this because Luther also gets a fail in my assessment when it comes to his attitude to cherry picking scripture. The most famous example of that is his diffident attitude to the epistle we call James. I tend incidentally to agree with those scholars such as Luke Timothy Johnson, who see no reason to suggest that the source of this epistle was not the brother of Jesus of Nazareth, the one we know as the Christ. Perhaps that’s a conversation for another day, but I put it out there anyway, if only to flag that I am unpersuaded by those methods of interpretation that decide that if tradition affirms something then it is clearly wrong.

I only partly digress because in this epistle and this reading in particular we find some deep and inconvenient wisdom. Martin Luther with his correct but obsessive and blinkered focus on God’s grace in the event of the cross found it necessary to describe the epistle of James as a “right strawy epistle” unworthy of his serious consideration. 

While I guess we all do it and always have done it, we can’t just shoulder aside biblical texts that don’t suit us. Luther doesn’t quite achieve that but he certainly comes close, and at best inadvertently gives us permission to do so.

James sees clearly the contrast between light- and life- and truth-bringing relationship to scripture and to God, on the one hand, and the playing of Antichrist games, or what I believe is the real meaning of using the Lord’s name in vain, distorting the gospel to suit racist or sexist or even homophobic bigotry, on the other. And of course the last of these is a highly complex minefield and not I think it is simple as waving an ideological wand.

Nevertheless in a year in which, if you have the misfortune to be like me deeply aware of and troubled by US politics, you’ll see there is an awful lot of what James warns us against: hanging out with the wrong crowd. And again, as I say in my notes, this does not refer to reaching out to and caring for those who are rough around the edges, which I hope has been a hallmark of my ministry for nearly 40 years. It does however mean avoiding hanging out with those who are cruel, those who are bullies, those who are exploiters of any form including sexual predators, those who disfigure and deny the lives of those around them, the underdogs, the broken, the emotionally, spiritually, psychologically or physically disfigured.

James challenges us to set such attitudes aside. As a litmus test I, not James, would say: where do we find the imago dei, image of God, that beautiful concept explored in the opening chapters of Genesis, in this person or that person with whom we are rubbing shoulders?

And if ever we wanted confirmation that James and Jesus were closely entwined in their thinking, it is in the records of Mark as he gives us Jesus’ interpretations of Torah, the Law. If this were a lecture not a sermon I would also go into the relationship between Mark and Paul, but for now let us simply say that James, of whom Paul was not always a fan, Mark, with whom Paul may have had a blistering falling out, and Jesus, all speak with one voice on this issue of integrity, of avoiding being soiled by the lack of integrity of others.

Jesus looks closely at those who play games with God, those whom he designates with telling accuracy as hypocrites. At those who use their religious sanctimoniousness as a weapon with which to bludgeon the vulnerable and the broken and the timid and the uncertain. I think immediately of those in our society who bludgeon those considering IVF or abortion, those wrestling with or rejoicing in sexuality which is alternate to mum dad and the kids behind a white picket fence, and those outside the Christian community for whatever reason. Jesus has no time for those who bludgeon the vulnerable with the sanctimonious use of biblical texts and self-serving, un-critiqued traditions.

And so all I can do is once again float the ideas that our passages present to us. Even the psalm, which can appear disturbingly self-righteous, is in context a recognition that any kind of righteousness can only be imparted by an ongoing desire to open ourselves up to and be formed by the love and the compassion and the justice of the God we cannot see,  the God who is revealed in our scriptures and in our liturgical practises.

wipe your nose

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the MISSION HALL, GLENORCHY

SUNDAY, AUGUST 28^th, 2024

 

Ephesians 6:10-20

 

Excuse if you will two brief preambles before I address the famous passage from Ephesians. The first is to say that I do not believe that in Anglican preaching we remain totally enslaved to preaching from the gospel passage, and I feel that for now we have extrapolated as much as we can from the bread sayings of Jesus in John. 

And secondly I will confess that there are occasions when I feel no sermon within me. I kind of know that many would be delighted if I said, arrgh let’s skip the sermon. I would be delighted too, accept that I sincerely believe that breaking open the word is a fundamental responsibility of a clergyperson, week by week.

Enough. As I say in my notes, I heard this passage from the tail end of Ephesians at the closing service of every term of my five years at prep school in Whanganui. The gravelly voice of Rodney Gould interned the words sombrely. This little boy, yet to become the adolescent atheist that he later was, felt the solemnity of the responsibility to which he was being commissioned. Put on the armour of God.

I can't speak for that enigmatic man Rodney Gould, but I suspect in many private school settings the armour of God resembled a private school uniform far more than it resembled the heavy baggage of the First Century soldier. And the duty of every small prep school boy was to remember to keep his shoes polished, his nose wiped, his knees clean, and not to use naughty words. I'm not sure about the command regarding my nose, but I'm pretty darned sure I failed the rest of the expectations of either Rodney Gould or the author of Ephesians.

But by the time that author, who I suspect was a disciple of Paul rather than Paul himself, wrote his letter to the church in Ephesus, Christ-bearing was becoming no trivial matter. Jewish and Roman leadership alike were getting a little bit antsy about this new cult, for at its best Christians were thumbing their nose at religious hypocrisy and at state corruption. And that is no easy stance to maintain without ruffling a few feathers, and, worse, gaolers’ keys.

All this passed over the head of that small boy, his mind already drifting to whichever James Bond movie he was going to watch over the holidays, and whether there would be time to fit in some riding lessons before school went back. 

And it is incredibly easy for it all to pass over our head too. There is at present little in our world that resembles the world of the First Century Ephesian Christians. We are not being persecuted for our faith, though we are perhaps being shouldered out of the place of honour in society that we had come to see as rightfully ours. 

That shouldering aside is, in my belief a work of God’s Spirit, for as a Christian people of God we had come to trust in shibboleths of social standing rather than Christ’s call to integrity and to seating others in the seats of honour. 

We are not being persecuted for our faith, though we may have to learn, as the early Christians did, that our faith is only one in a marketplace of many and of none, and the task of proclaiming Christ and him crucified, as Saint Paul puts it, can only be achieved by the integrity of our lives, and by the whispers of our love for our neighbour, and especially for the disadvantaged.

None of that crossed my mind as I listened to Rodney Gould and thought of the excitement of a two hour drive home, for even then to be in a moving vehicle was my greatest joy. And I would not dare to claim that in the five decades since I have gained any greater comprehension of God or gospel. 

But I have come however stumblingly, to recognise the importance of God’s claims on my life, God’s demand that I offer myself as a living sacrifice, what our writer calls keeping alert and always persevering, not just in our prayers but in our whole of life witness. 

And as I think these words I am reminded of a song that some of you may have known from a Christian singer of the 1970s, Keith Green, killed far too young in a plane accident, and wise beyond his years. He prayed to his God and mine, “make my life a prayer to you.” 

If and as we pray that prayer we may indeed be donning the whole armour of God. 

in vino veritas?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

AND ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, AUGUST 18^th, 2024

 

John 6: 56-59

 

By way of background, one of the amusing things about this Year of Mark, as the lectionary compilers call it, is that we take a large chunk of time out of Mark and immerse ourselves in John’s account of the Jesus story. For that reason we have been for the last couple of weeks, and will be for another week yet, deeply immersed in the very challenging scenes and sayings of John Chapter 6.

In this chapter John has Jesus taking us into some very deep reflections on who he is and how we are supposed to respond to him when he is no longer visible to us – which of course he has not been for some two millennia.

With a whole lot of background about the Old Testament people of God, their recalcitrance and failure to live up to the demands of Torah, of Law, Jesus tells his listeners that he is Torah embodied for us – the language of bread and wine are rich with Hebrew understandings of how Torah and obedience to God are encountered and enacted. The knowledge of the Hebrew people would be such that they knew only too well that their ancestors, and if they were being honest they themselves, had not been terribly good at embodying the Torah, the Law, the demands of God.

It is almost, then, that God in Christ has another go. And at one level it’s okay to see it like that. That does not give us permission to have an anti-Jewish, much less anti-Semitic view of human history. By no means, as the apostle Paul often said. But we are encouraged to see our own ability to be not good enough or even wilfully stroppy in our own faith lives.

Having said all that, what is all this stuff about eating and drinking Jesus? I certainly don’t think it’s merely a reference to the meal that we will be symbolically engaging in in a few minutes at the communion table or altar. It is that but it is so much more.

Funnily enough it has been the muslin wearing mung bean munching crystal hugging hippies and new agers that have given me the best means by which to understand something of Jesus’ language. For if the symbols that he gives us of bread and wine are pregnant with, impregnated with the whole meaning of his life then we are using the language of “life force.” The Spirit as it were present in Jesus, who we call Holy Spirit, is transferred into our being by this simple act of ingesting.

But this is no waving of a magical wand. By reaching out my hands and receiving and consuming a tasteless wafer and a miniscule sip of wine I'm not engaging in some kind of magic that will transform me or my world. 

I am however engaging in an act of faith. Faith that this simple action that Jesus has given us is saturated, I say again, with the whole meaning of his life, death, resurrection, and that we, like the Hebrew people in the wilderness, are opening ourselves up to all of that. We are being, as both Paul and Jesus put it, grafted onto all that he was and is and will be. It is not magic, but a disciplined opening of ourselves again and again to the demands and the responsibilities of wearing Christ’s name, and the demands that he makes on our lives.

By eating and drinking, by consuming Jesus, we are in an immeasurably intimate relationship with him and all that he is. Early Christians were accused of cannibalism because of the strange language that Jesus uses. Sociologists of religion will tell us that ancient rites of cannibalism, such as those that I recently read about in Monty Soutar’s novel Kawai, was never about food, but always about ingesting the life force of a vanquished foe.

We are of course taught to believe that in the resurrection Jesus does not remain vanquished, nevertheless he has been there, and we ingest his suffering, his sorrow, and his irrepressible death-conquering essence.

Consume me, says Jesus. It is a simple enough act that we will undertake in a few minutes. But it is not magical. It is a commissioning over and over again to expose ourselves to embody all his compassion, all his devotion to the one he calls Father, the Creator of all that is seen and unseen; all his vulnerability, all his transformative energy as he addresses the injustices around him. All that and so much more in a simple act of reaching out and receiving him, or signs saturated by him.

In the end this is never an intellectual matter, and my words can just be bewildering. Bewildering because the matter of which we speak is beyond human understanding, first off. Bewildering, too, because the essence of this Jesus-teaching is that we are called to reach out in all our incomprehension and fallibility, in this most simple of ways, to accept all that God makes available to us week by week, again and again until we too become saturated with the radiant light and life of Christ.

part and parcel

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

AND ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, AUGUST 11^th, 2024

 

John 6: 35, 41-51

 

As most of you, or at least most of you who live and worship here permanently, will know I'm a product or survivor of what I've often intended to call “one of those schools.” By “those” I mean private schools in the Anglican tradition, indeed one of the schools that Anne had under her watchful eye as director of the Anglican Schools Office.

As part of the special character of such schools it is expected that they will have a chaplain and a notable and distinctive Anglican Christian input. I was privileged to be at the school at the time of an outstanding chaplain, and there was an additional interlude during which he was replaced, perhaps he was on leave or something, by a wonderfully creative but even more out of the ordinary or eccentric chaplain. As it happens they were both called John.

The more outlandish of the two was on the school staff as an art teacher, and again I had the privilege of sitting at his feet for a year in his what was then seventh form history of art classes, which for some reason I was taking as a scholarship subject. Never mind that I in fact never turned up for the exam at the end of the year.

John II as I shall call him was as you would imagine creative, with a deep sense of God in all the arts, a deep sense of the power of the visual, and as it happens and rightly that extended to the power of other forms of the arts including liturgy. One night for reasons I can’t remember, he was in the one of seven boarding houses to which I belonged, and was celebrating communion for the senior boys. Despite being an avowed atheist, my respect for John II, and my dislike of the normal evening routine meant that I sat in on the communion-slash-discussion group. John II was engaging and compassionate and seemed to enjoy having a sceptic present.

But that wasn’t what I was going to tell you. What I’ve remembered ever since was that night he celebrated communion using not bread and wine but beer – only I might add a communion sized sip per boy – and potato crisps, or as we called them in those days, potato chips. His point was that communion was an everyday act, involving everyday aspects of, in this case, New Zealand life.  To some extent as I reflected on it years later it was a point well made.

In some denominations in the Pacific islands a form of sacramental theology known as “coconut theology” evolved, because the coconut itself was a perfect expression of the stuff of life that communion should be. The flesh of the coconut to a native Fijian far more closely resembled the bread of life to which Jesus likened his own body, and the milk of the coconut in a largely teetotal (at least in theory) society, far more adequately or less ambivalently expressed the wine made blood, the life force that the blood of Christ is traditionally in Christian speech.

As I thought over these things for many decades, and even discussed them vigorously at theological college, it seemed to me that John II was onto something but not quite the right thing. Certainly beer in the 1970s in New Zealand society was very much akin to wine and in first century Middle Eastern societies, or indeed across countries in Western Europe today, a part and parcel of life.

I hasten to add I don't mean the 6:00 swill kind of beer drinking which was an earlier phenomenon in New Zealand, or the drunken summer private school party beer drinking, but the part of life that I still enjoy, a pleasant beer with or before a good meal.

The crisps however had me worried, and still do. These days I largely avoid them, though I must say I find salt and vinegar all but irresistible. but the saturated fats disturbed me. And that’s almost the point. The bread of life of which Jesus spoke was the very Stuff of Life, the very substance of life. Emma Wilson was indeed right to point out in our gospel conversation this past week that the sanitised wafer of Anglican liturgy is not what Jesus was referring to.

As an aside you may have noticed that I am trying increasingly to use the single wafer rather than the somewhat insulting notion of separate priest’s and people’s wafers which have been for so long our tradition, despite announcing at the fraction that we all share in the one bread. And yes I get that the bread is, in recipe terms, “one,” but not in visual terms or even symbolic terms.

So what I think of the wonderful and honourable John II got delightfully wrong, and Emma Wilson got delightfully right, was the very thingyness, the substantive nature of the bread-made-body and body-made-bread to which Jesus was drawing attention. And despite the everyday place of beer, at least in 1970s New Zealand culture, wine too was effectively an essential part of Middle Eastern life. This of course being long before the prohibitions that are part and parcel of much later Islamic cultures.

So I suppose what I take away from this and what I hope you might at least consider is what I would call the normality of communion. Despite my being from the more Catholic end of Anglicanism in most circumstances I prefer to downplay some of the fussiness and detail of liturgy. Bread and wine are essential symbols. My theology is high enough that I believe they are absolutely impregnated with the meaning of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. But they are also the stuff of life, and I believe they should be both intellectually and physically accessible to all of us as a normal and beautiful encounter with our incomprehensible God, God drawn close to, and dwelling amongst us.

So despite the formality of the way in which we distribute communion and receive communion I hope we can also hold onto an understanding that it is of the very essence or being alive, of encountering God, and to draw on a very Fourth Gospel idea, to consume and imbibe the very essence of all that God is for us.

simple intergrity, ta

edited transcript of an ad lib sermon ...    

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

AND ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, AUGUST 8^th, 2024

John 6: 24-35

 

There are, as I said last week, several accounts of feeding miracles in the New Testament. Last week we had the feeding of the 5000 which appears several times across the New Testament. Six times altogether if you count the two of 4000, if you get my meaning, and that motif of feeding goes on into this passage but there’s something else going on in in John’s working of the of the Jesus story.

The key theme that runs through this I think is the theme of integrity. Another theme that runs right through the Fourth gospel is the question of searching for Jesus, and when John was writing Jesus story he was writing for his own community in the north of that whole half of the world that’s is in turmoil now, Israel Beirut, Palestine somewhere up on the eastern Mediterranean in his little community. And he wanted to encourage them in their integrity as followers of Jesus so he depicts the scene of searching for Jesus but at this point – or searching for meaning even – but at this point he presents a crowd that really isn’t looking in the right places or for the right reasons.

And in in our modern world we might say we’ve got a crowd that is kind of looking for entertainment the entertainment value of Jesus which I don't think is what we’re meant to be doing, and I think John is trying to instruct us that that’s not what we meant to be doing.

Some of you will remember either the musical or the film Superstar, and in that you get that wonderful  – I think I clever moment, when Herod tells Jesus “walk across my swimming pool. You know I’ve heard you can do lots of miracles, let’s see you walk across the swimming pool."

And I think sometimes the church in all its forms can slip into that performance-based expectation of God and God revealed in Jesus, So it’s not so much in what the natrator says, but in what Jesus says back to this crowd, who are once again hungry, once again spiritually and physically hungry, it’s in what Jesus says that we begin to see a their lack of integrity. They want to see a sign.

Now wait a minute … if we go back through the chapter, which we’re not gonna do today because we did it last week, but we’d find plenty of signs. He’s just fed 5000, he’s just walked across a bit of water and their response is “Oh yeah but show us something decent.”

I think it’s incredible human nature but it’s incredibly not what we’re meant to be doing as a people of God.

Funnily enough,you know I was back up in the Mackenzie country on Friday for a meeting, and you know you look up at the hills, you look at the complexity of creation, you look at the magnificence of nature and I think at that point, if I say “Yeah, but  show me a sign,” I’m probably falling into the same trap.

And it can be not just at that level, but why as a human being, who has no physiological need to see beauty should I be allowed to see beauty?

I mean an ant doesn’t look up in the morning – and they’re pretty clever little things – and say “My goodness that’s an amazing sunrise.” We do, and we have to be fairly hard-hearted if we don’t.

So somethings are purely biological. I won’t talk about walking down the street and seeing a Pretty Woman, but I imagine that song “Pretty Woman walking down the Street,” you know, or let’s not be sexist it might be something else or the other way around or whatever, you can just boil that down to a biological need. Sunset, beautiful piece of music … there’s no biological reason. So they’re part of this imprint of God that the Old Testament calls the image of God.

And that human need to see a sign infiltrates this passage. This mob who have just seen some pretty good clues that Jesus is fairly special, want a sign. And I think Jesus is kind of patient but with that, almost a holy irritation,  saying “now come on guys I think I'm probably showing you enough.” To go back through the miracles, and as John constructs them, they’re all incredible moments; the overflowing ouof wine at the wedding at Cana which I spoke about in the context of the wedding yesterday … you know that’s 180 gallons of wine where there wasn’t any just before, so that’s a reasonable sign in the narrative of what God can and will do for human lives.

I think John also in this passage wants to contrast this kind of flippant “show us a sign, walk across my swimming pool, with authentic searches for justice, for compassion, for integrity, for hope. And I think wherever we see them, and you’ll see that line in John's account of the gospel of “there are others not of my flock who are the sheep of my pasture.” John says “let’s not narrow our vision down so we’re just self-congratulatory. where else might we see the work of God outside the boundaries of our faith communities?”

So there’s a lot going on in this passage. In the end Jesus in this passage shows no tendency to showiness. There’s nothing flashy. He doesn’t walk across the swimming pool or whatever its comparison might be. But he turns just to what I call “powerless compassion of love.” His heart goes out to the crowds, his heart goes out to people all the time. And throughout John’s account of the gospel he embodies this love, he doesn’t rely on eloquence he doesn’t rely on being a smart orator. He’s a good storyteller … later on we will find Paul in the epistles also says “Hey I’m not very eloquent, I just want the integrity of my words to carry the gospel message.”

Jesus allows the integrity of his being to do the talking, as Paul was to do later on.

So I think what we take away in a sense from this little glimpse of Jesus in this passage is this sense of how do we ensure that our lives are lives of integrity?

And I mean I get impressed within the community of faith that I see so many lives of integrity. I’m not gonna embarrass you by saying, you know, to what extent I see it, but it is heartwarming. I see people in these little faith communities living out by and large wonderful lives which express justice and compassion and hope. And that is what we called to be. And awe we gather together each Sunday and do our best to be here and to serve God we just are renewed in that attempt to be a people of authenticity or integrity.