Jesus gets ouchie

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 28

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 4: 12-16

Psalm 106: 1-5

Mark 10: 17-31

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 28

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 4: 12-16

Psalm 106: 1-5

Mark 10: 17-31

 

It’s a little hard to ignore the fact that that gospel reading makes for uncomfortable reading for us all. The demands of the gospel are not to be trivialised, and there is a tendency for us all, and I include myself as I shall explain, to seize on the almost-closing words of this scene, rendered here as “for mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible,” to seize on them at the expense of dwelling on the all but terrifying demands of the paragraphs on either side. The man, Jesus’ interlocutor, goes away sad. That’s one bookend to the passage. “Many who are first will be lost, and the last will be first.” That’s another bookend to the passage.

And at the risk of making me squirm as much as maybe I make us all squirm, are not these chilling words particularly daunting when we recognise that we live in a town where houses that are empty or filled for only small fractions of the year are owned by people with other houses elsewhere – no matter how hard they may have worked to own multiple houses, the case still rests. It rests more weightily still when we recognise, as we will increasingly, that there are homeless people on our church and office steps, sleeping rough. It is, while I am no social work expert, too easy to say that they have other choices. The choices I hear from them, and from specialists in the field, is that either through employment or through mental health issues, these are people for whom there is an imperfect safety net even in egalitarian New Zealand.

But when I preach I preach not to make you squirm but to make me squirm. I may not have multiple properties, although as I live in two places at the moment I may squirm a little on that basis alone. But I have over the years spent an inordinate amount of  money for example on books which in rare moments of excruciating honesty I should probably admit I do not need, and if I can extrapolate from Jesus’ teachings on adultery and looking on sexually desirable human beings (for more than three seconds of course) as being a form of adultery, then by extrapolation I know that, when I dribble over the sight of a Maserati, Bentley, or Aston Martin, I know that I too if I had the chance would be driving one, and that I too am therefore trapped in the cycles of consumerism.

“Point not at others lest you notice the fingers pointing at yourself,” as Jesus didn’t quite say, though he says many equally telling things: many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

The challenge for us is to act rightly. For us who are all, regardless of our actual assets, comparatively blessed with riches (it is always worth remembering that we are in the top few percent of the world’s wealth owners), the challenge is to discern how best we can act philanthropically, how we can act generously, how we can act, preferably crazily, to benefit the lives of others in the dark holes, nationally and internationally, of poverty and injustice.

The author of Hebrews is, I grudgingly admit, right: the word of God (and she was referring to the Hebrew scriptures) is sharper than any two edged sword. As Christ bearers we have come to know Jesus, hopefully with a deep and intimate knowledge, as the Word of God, the embodiment of acting out all God’s demands and commands. The author of Hebrews is right because by the merciful power of God’s Spirit Jesus does draw alongside and even within us to guide us on a more excellent way. It is impossible – or I hope it is – to hear the words of Jesus to this eager would be Jesus-follower, and to the disciples standing by, without being challenged to take a long and hard look at ourselves and the standards of generosity and compassion that we set and follow ourselves.

As we look at our media each day and seeing telling signs of a civilization that is crumbling  (and I do not mean that lightly), we might well remember that it is God who builds up and tears down, and who may be handing over (to quote a phrase from Romans) at the very least the wealthy peoples of the world to the ramifications of our own somewhat indulgent lifestyles.

I am always told that a sermon should contain good news. Saint Hilda’s Chaplain Dr. Gillian Townsley somewhat rocked the socks off my recent gospel conversation when she emphasised that the good news in this passage is that we all die. 

Once we had a chance to pick ourselves up from her statement, for at the very least it was a somewhat unusual interpretive angle to place on this passage, she reminded us that death is the great leveller, and that we are, again at the very least through a veil of tears, invited to enter, to use now my words not hers, the loving judgement of God. 

Nearly all of us have got possessions badly wrong, but we can offer to our God of the best of what we have been able to do and implore and know the forgiveness of God where we have corporately and individually failed. 

It is small wonder that the earliest Christians wrote of judgement often in tandem with writing of tears. Yet in saying that, I have a deep sense that while there will be tears of sorrow in whatever the resurrection means, there will be tears of laughter too.

 

 

 

  

 

annual-ish mea culpa

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 27

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 1:1-4

Psalm 26

Mark 10:2-16

 

Because we are a liturgical, lectionary following (more or less) faith community I am faced with the ritual encounter with Jesus’ teachings on divorce almost annually. Because on the whole I’ve moved around far too much, and no I’m not running from something, just as Lord Byron would have called it, a restless soul, because I’ve moved around a lot I’ve tended not to have to preach on this passage and its parallels in the same place too often. Last year I escaped it because I was not yet with you, next year I’m going to be lying on a Hawaiian beach sipping pina coladas or something. Today I have no wriggle room. It is my annual mea culpa.

Because of course to those of you who are not visitors it will be well known that I stand here not only as a divorced person, but as a remarried person, with as it happens children on either side of the equation. Enough about me, Except to say that honesty is I think the best policy, and the severity of Jesus’ teaching is not to be trivialised.

So what this becomes is an exercise in which academic people call “hermeneutics”; loosely, the science of interpretation. As we can probably all remember from our secondary school days every text is open to a plethora, even an infinity of realistic interpretations. Jesus teachings on divorce and remarriage are in their biblical versions pretty much unambivalent, and yet most Christian bodies across the world, with the slightly slippery exception of the Roman Catholic Church, have chosen to ignore them. What is going on? And for that matter are they to be put in the same category as Paul’s teachings on hair length and hats, or are they, because they are apparently the words of Jesus, to be given extra weight, red ink perhaps, and in that case do we then have what scholars call a “canon within the canon,” biblical texts that are more important than others, to be taken more seriously than others?

These are big questions and we can probably save them for when you join in a theological studies programme, which of course I hope you all will at some stage in the next decade or two or three. But I put it out there because I believe the biblical texts are not something to be trivialised. A colleague who, sadly, died recently, once shocked me by his declaration that he was not going to have his life ruled by an old book. I cannot be so dismissive. The 66 books that make up the form of the Bible preferred by Protestants, or the 72 or sometimes 73 books in the Bible as accepted by the Roman Catholic Church, (which I prefer unashamedly), came to be collected together through sweat and tears and even blood, as Christ-followers sought to determine which books most accurately convey the will and the purpose of God, as revealed in Christ. It’s a long story. But it is not just an old book, but a collection of books that point to the heart of God.

So what do I do as a divorced and remarried person when it tells me that I am an adulterer, and indeed that by remarrying I have made Anne adulterous too? Put that way it sounds pretty brutal, and it is.

My response is to acknowledge who I am and where I’ve been. Strangely in my pastoral career I have often found this sad story to be encouraging for those for whom I have cared and to whom I have listened. While I am obviously not recommending that every clergy person should have a divorce, I have found on the whole that people have responded with relief that a person with their collar back to front is a person with glitches and scar tissue. But that is no excuse. My starting point must be that I acknowledge that I made bad mistakes in my life.

My continuation point is more important. The story of Jesus is the story of divinity meeting us in the dark struggles of being human. I came not to condemn, says Jesus, and we see that he meant it in his warm compassionate and welcoming attitude to so many of the struggling people that he met in his public ministry.

I am in any case relieved when it comes to the question of being adulterous that Jesus makes it quite clear that ogling, a human tendency that a great deal of our advertising industry is based on, and to which certainly many males and perhaps even some females have not been completely impervious, is basis enough on which we should all – well all of us who admit to this weakness – be plucking out our eyes.

In the end I think the question comes down to that struggle for integrity or authenticity. When, infamously, televangelists announced that they have had an affair but it’s all right because the devil made them do it, I suspect they are falling short of that very flexible question of integrity. I hope and pray that I and others who have sought to serve Christ despite the flaws in our lives do not fall into that obscenity. I hope that those of us who have gone through the painful journey of marital breakup and perhaps the joy-filled journey of discovering new love will have always been seeking damage control for children, decency in relationship with estranged partners, and a sort of never-ending acknowledgement, but not ongoing brutal self-castigation, that this has been an error, a glitch, a sin, in our journey as we seek to follow Christ.

We live in a remarkable age. I often feel the boundaries have been erased too radically. I remember with wry amusement our youngest son coming home from secondary school one day and announcing that it was terribly embarrassing that his biological parents were still married to each other, as he was, he said, the only one in his year group who had to suffer such shame. I remember both sons, and I usually avoid telling family tales, shrugging their shoulders and asking what was for dinner when told that a family member was gay. I remember, years after my divorce, talking with my daughters about the life-mistakes that I had made, which had been briefly publicised following my wrongful dismissal nearly a decade ago: There was neither surprise nor condemnation from these strong young women who had the most right to judge and find me guilty.

It is always possible for us to indulge in cauterising, numbing our conscience. Macbeth speaks of it when he speaks of being so far in blood that sin will prick on sin. But ultimately it is up to us to be honest about our lives and to seek in both the highs and the lows of our journey to find ways by which we may proclaim and glorify our risen Lord.