like a child, be powerless

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 22^nd, 2024

 

 

Proverbs 31: 10-31

Mark 9: 30-37

 

 

As I sat down to get my head around our readings I found myself in a fascinating three-world kaleidoscope of information. As I often do I broke all my rules and omitted the psalm from our liturgy today; I did so in order to emphasise the magnificence and the radicalism of the very distinct passage from Proverbs. As that was reverberating through my mind I was also reading powerful writings by Bishop Penny Jamieson and some of the leading women’s voices from this diocese in the late 1980s and early ’90s. And if that wasn’t enough I find Jesus telling me that I am to become, you are to become, even the church is to become as if a small and seemingly unimportant, nameless child.

Early in my theological journeys I leaned to emphasize what I refer to as the powerlessness of the Cross. Against the glorification of Jesus’ death it is an emphasis on the absolute absence of glory. More – the absolute absence of what we might call headline material in the events of the life and death and teachings of Jesus.

Does it matter. Let me at least hint at an explanatiuon.

As the disciples came to Jesus arguing on the road they were arguing about greatness and magnificence and neon lights or their firstst century equivalent. They were arguing about glory and greatness and headlines. Jesus, poignantly aware of the likely outcome of his conflict with authorities, turned instead to a powerless child, devoid of rights in his or her society, and said, effectively, be like this child, be this child.

Be vulnerable, be nameless, be someone who unlike the principalities and powers against which Saint Paul railed, unlike them, be without rights, be without power, be no one. As he soon would become no one, no person.

Let me turn for a moment to the woman of strength in Proverbs. This acrostic poem of course celebrates, as the opening line puts it, a remarkable woman. But a strong woman in her day was hardly a Margaret Thatcher if I may be a little historic, or, to maintain an even balance between the right and the left, a Helen Clark. And she was, in any case, cited as a contrast to the humdrum state of most of her kind.

This idealised woman of the book of Proverbs is at least in part a celebration of the mysterious figure we call Wisdom, the feminine force of God that came to be identified closely with the Christian understanding of Holy Spirit. But she is also a woman, and the very fact that women like her, like Ruth, like Naomi, who stand out in the Old Testament stand out precisely because opportunity for women to stand out were so few and far between. That should remind us that political and military and physical power still remained firmly in their hands of those with a Y-chromosome.

In 1991 Penny Jamieson, whose trailblazing journey cost her, I sense, so deeply delivered a remarkable address to women in the Waikato, reminding them amongst other things that the consecration of the world’s first female bishop was not the ushering in of Utopia, not the glorious and final entrance into the Promised Land, but just one step along the way as women and men in church and society, but primarily in the body of Christ, learned the meaning of Paul’s words: “neither male nor female.”

Woven into Penny’s address and, I think, her thought generally was the recognition that traditional models of power, especially patriarchal models of power, are counter gospel. Waving big sticks is not the way of the child – well it is when children are playing or misbehaving, but not the way of the child that Jesus places as a counterculture in the midst of the arguing disciples. It is not the way of the Giod who becomes powerless, for us, with us.

The church has a long way to go towards realising Penny’s ideal, and she herself is forced to admit in her address that she does not always attain it.

“The call to Christian women today is not to be contented with the Promised Land, with its isolated and all-too-temporary ecstasy, but rather to reach in open and shared vulnerability with men to the Cross of Christ and for the fulfilment of all that is promised in that Cross; to a future in which there will be “neither man nor woman.”

As part of that we are being called to rely not on social standing or other un-God power, but on the simplicity of powerless, authentic faith. Faith in the one who became utterly powerless for us. And there the journey of being church in the 21^st century begins.

Penny herself, and every female church leader since her (and there have been too few in this country) were often forced into a power-mongering mould. We are not, she emphasised, as yet, in the Promised Land.

We are though in challenging and uncertain times. We have been for some decades, but are arguably increasingly so. Certainly as church we are being forced rightly or wrongly to the fringes of society, forced rightly or wrongly to surrender much that our forebears took for granted. I make no secret of the belief that I believe an awful lot of our infrastructure will disappear in the next decade. Our buildings, our paid clergy (and yes, that is me), our few remaining privileges in the community will gradually turn to dust. 

There is more than one way to walk along the road arguing who is the greatest. If nothing else my research in the history of the diocese has reminded me that an awful lot of ink was spent in subtle forms of affirming that we, not they, (whoever “they” might be), should have the place of honour after the table. 

Those days are gone, and I believe that to be a work of the Spirit as we learn to be a gospel people whose mission is built on service and confession and love, and not on any expectation that we are great or important in society.

And if all this is a little esoteric as we weave together readings from Proverbs, from a former diocesan bishop, and from a powerful teaching moment as Jesus turned to face his own looming lopsided struggle with authorities and almost certain death, if all this is a little esoteric it is because the challenge is to see through a different lens, to see our mission no longer as a people with standing in society, but as a servant people with open arms and willing hearts. Our challenge is to be an unimportant people of God walking on that unspectacular road to Jerusalem and cross and above all resurrection hope.