advent musings

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1^st, 2024

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT

 

READINGS

 

Jeremiah 33:14-161

Psalm 25:1-9

Luke 21: 25-28

 

In the Seventeenth Century a Carmelite Friar, who took the name Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, regularly penned his thoughts on the life of faith. The came to be known as the “practice of the presence of God,” and in all their simplicity, they came to be one of the most widely printed – and read – books of all time.

Brother Lawrence’s outlook was deceptively simple. Simple, because the heart of this lifestyle was the simple desire to see and to serve God in all he did. Deceptive, because the Carmelite life is marked by daily silence for prayer, structured reading of psalms, and observation of two hours daily of prayerful silence. On top of this the Carmelites are committed to a life of study.

Brother Lawrence therefore, unlike Yours Truly, was no sort of Christian hippie. Yet for those of us who struggle along with lesser discipline or no discipline at all there are at least the rudiments of deeper relationship with God in his teachings. As George Herbert put it, independently of Brother Lawrence,

Teach me, my God and King,
in all things thee to see,
and what I do in anything
to do it as for thee.

As a professional, and seemingly incurable birdbrain, I have never achieved anything remotely resembling the disciplines of Brother Lawrence or even George Herbert, whose hymn I just quoted. But across the readings of this day there runs the theme of the immediacy of God – an immediately of time and space. God is just there – just here – around and within us, made present to all the degree we need by the one we call Spirit. 

God is present through all time, from pre-time to post-time, though we can never understand this, because we are laid low by timefulness. But perhaps more significant for this first Sunday of Advent, all time is, if I can put it this way, all time is present in the God who is timelessly present with us. And so our readings focus on divine immediacy, preparation to encounter God no longer, as Paul put it, through a glass darkly, but face to face. Face to face: that encounter that the Hebrews knew to be impossible to survive, but for which we are encouraged to practice for by preparation each day.

And while we may never be Brother Lawrences, we are at the very least encouraged to generate, or perhaps to permit, awareness of the presence of God, embodiment of love and compassionate judgement, in our every moment.

babels crumble

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 33

 

READINGS

 

Hebrews 10: 19-25

Psalm 16

Mark 13: 1-8

 

In the Hebrews readings of recent weeks we have been catching glimpses of the Christ who goes before us through the entire range of human experience. Not, of course, the specifics of driving a Mitsubishi or hang-gliding or, yes, running a marathon, nor of being female or wealthy, but the whole range of human emotional response to the world we live in.

I mention “wealthy” because, guiding our understanding of the life of Jesus is the profound insight we can gain from a few sentences in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, that this person who the earliest Christians knew, following the resurrection, to be divine, was also voluntarily emptied of what we might call the privileges of divinity. He emptied himself, as Paul put it, and became obedient to the forces of human existence, to the will, too of God, even to death on a cross. Gods do not generally enter the fully human experience of alienation from divinity, and even of death. I say this because in the Gospel reading just now we see the pre-resurrection, pre-crucifixion even, disciples getting that badly, humanly wrong. The comment made by the unnamed disciple was innocuous enough. The Temple was a massive building, ostentatious, opulent, a far cry from the early Jewish understanding of a God who was comfortable with just a tent.

Which is not to say God did not permit the building of the Temple. Sometimes humanity needs to learn harsh lessons. Sometimes our cathedrals fall down. Sometimes our temples are torn down. Sometimes even our planet heats up, falling foul of human greed, as it accelerates the harsh cycles of nature. Even then we must follow in the footsteps of the One who has experienced all, from conception to birth to annihilation and all in between.

Some of us remember the poem almost always thrown at us in public examinations for literature, Ozymandias. In that poem a megalomaniacal figure, a Trump on steroids, has built immeasurable monuments to his own self-importance. Allusion to Trump is not altogether accidental. Having stood at the foot of one of his opulent towers I cannot ever forget the crushing feeling of revulsion – at that stage I had never heard of Donald Trump – that a person could so ostentatiously proclaim his worth.

But not just him; businesses outdoing each other by pushing their glass towers to the skies to proclaim the majesty of Mohamed Kajoor Alabbar’s Burj Khalifa in Dubai, or the finance company Permodalan Nasional Berhad’s Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur, or Shanghai Tower’s proclamation of it and its people’s self-importance. Those are secular buildings, some proclaiming greed, perhaps at best some proclaiming business success.

Sacred buildings too are vulnerable to the warp and weft of time, nature and politics. The cathedral of which I was briefly dean is facing condemnation, likely to be the second time that building has come down. Christchurch’s Roman Catholic and Anglican cathedrals, however magnificent, fell in a few seconds of natural terror. Darwin’s and Coventry’s were destroyed in war.

 I have no idea of the earthquake status of our stone building (St. Peter’s) but a decent wobble of the Alpine fault, or a careless flame at St Paul’s, could shatter the dreams of our forebears. They are not necessarily acts of God, as insurers used to like to call them, but they are reminders of the vulnerability of existence. And our mokopuna and mokopuna’s mokopuna may or may not survive the ravages of an overheating planet that we are bequeathing them.

And all of this was at least notionally in the mind of Jesus as he reminded his immediate followers of the vulnerability of human existence, and indeed of all existence. “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” The poem “Ozymandias” tickled the raw nerve of human arrogance; surveying the wreckage of the narcissistic Ozymandias’  shrine to self-importance with the caustic comment, “nothing beside remains. / Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Jesus warned that it would be ever thus. He warned too that human conflicts would go on, and that they would be misrepresented as harbingers of the end of time. The nature of energy and existence is such that one day all that we see and know will collapse around our ears, and the nature of humanity is such that some will make outrageous and misleading claims to be the servants of God during such apocalyptic times.

Have none of this, Jesus indicates but trust in the greatness and the compassion of the unseen God, revealed in him, Jesus, trust in his warming human footsteps through whatever military, ecological, economic, and even medical crises dwell ahead. And always just ahead of us the footsteps of the Christ who has been through it and conquered it all remain warm and secure as we tread our paths.

 

Robes? Not the Thing, please.

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3^rd, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 31 (and ALL SAINTS’, translated)

 

READINGS

 

Hebrews 9: 11-14

Psalm 146: 1-8

Mark 12: 38-44

 

 

If you are in the know you will be aware that today can be celebrated as All Saints’ Sunday. It is a wonderful feast of the church year, and a great counterbalance to the idiocies of Halloween, yet another piece of American commercialism that did not exist for most of us when we were young. Unless of course we watched that critical and iconic American documentary Scooby-Doo. But apart from that? Certainly, I was always unaware of Halloween – though I admit growing up in New Zealand I was at this time of the year building up excitement against that equally ridiculous observation of Guy Fawkes, mercifully banned in Australia, where as many of you know I’ve spent half my life.

Yet by dwelling on the readings that have continued through the past many weeks, readings from Mark and from Hebrews, I think there is a deep connection with the notion of the saints.

By “saints” I am never referring to that slightly bewildering practice of the Roman Catholic communion, one of very few that I don’t agree with, of a coven of elderly men sitting at a board table discussing whether posthumous miracles emanating from a saint’s sarcophagus or bodily remains, or some such, can be authenticated.

When I look back on the saints that have registered on my consciousness, about whom I've often spoken on All Saints Days over the year, saints like Molly and Leo and Ursula* that I’ve mentioned (though not here) I need no greater proof of holiness than that they have dared to struggle on, believing in our invisible God, often against all odds. That they have reached out their hands to receive communion believing that in some way it is for us the body and blood of Christ, against all odds. That they have dared to cling to the hope of resurrection and of justice, often against all odds. They have no shrines or weeping statues.

As we have journeyed through Hebrews in recent weeks I have had to remind us all from time to time that the priesthood of Christ in which all Christians share is the biblical priesthood, and that it is only by an unfortunate fluke of translation that those of us who wear our collars back to front and even sometimes wear dresses on a Sunday have come to be called priests. Let us ignore that word at least in so much as it applies to clergy.

Yet in some ways the word saint has undergone the same corruption as the word priest. It is not often that I say this but with regards to this word it is the Protestant and Pentecostal denominations that have got the terminology right. To be made a saint is simply to be a person who has taken the commitment to open heart mind and soul to the risen Lord. To be a person who has dared, in some cases more daringly than others, to believe that Jesus is Lord. And we can of course argue for a lifetime as to what that means in its out-working, but it is fundamentally the same: to believe that Jesus has entered our lives, and is transforming our lives into his own likeness, despite our flaws and fallibilities, and often our active resistance.

So although I cringe when I hear it, Pentecostal pastors for example are theologically correct when they turn to the congregation and call them saints. I cringe a little because it can sound not so much Christ-righteous but collectively self-righteous, especially as the speaker will always be including him or herself in the description. The emphasis has to be on the holiness and the righteousness of the Christ who calls us not on any residue of goodness that happens to attach itself to the sieve of our lives. And when we forget that, when we parade our self righteousness then we become what Jesus in our passage today highlights as the behaviour of the scribes, “who likes to walk around in long robes and be greeted with respect” etc.

AHEM!

(Do I notice what I am wearing most Sundays? Well … yes. As an aside, when once faced with a barrage of criticism delivered to my then bishop about my terrible performance as a priest, I refuted myriad claims except the last one, that I did not look after my robes. I pleaded guilty. I have never quite got the hang of wearing a dress, much less looking after it, as some of you may have noticed!)

No, that is just an ancient and harmless tradition, in the same way that a judge or academic might wear robes in a formal ceremony, to add colour and gravitas. Event Protestant pastors have dress codes!

But if I come to believe that the robes are The Thing, or worse than I am The Thing, then I am revoking my sainthood, in the sense that Paul in the New Testament uses that word. I am becoming as a scribe or a pharisee, as a phylactery-wearing hypocrite seeking aggrandisement as I strut around thinking I’m important.

And, contrary to some Protestant paranoia, the same is true of using the title “Father,” which was something of the norm in circles that I moved in in Australia, and particularly so amongst some indigenous peoples. The title becomes a barrier to my Christ-bearing when I begin to abuse it, seeking power or glory, rather than just seeking by the grace of God to touch a life or two with a hint of divine love. You may of course know it that I haven’t dared to use that title in the New Zealand church, where it is less common. In any case the ordination of women made this a complex deal, and being married to a woman who is a priest has made it more complex still.

Jesus uses the metaphors of robes and phylacteries and titles to describe any way in which we as bearers of his name can mar the integrity of our witness. I once watched a priest clad in all black shouldering mere parishioners aside at a diocesan function (not in this diocese) to get to the goodies at the table before mere hoi polloi. It was a shocking display of phylactery-wearing, father-parading hypocrisy. Sadly some of the tales of abuse that have emanated from the church have far exceeded even that. Our response must always to ascertain whether we are seeking the place of honour at any metaphorical table, or indeed, real table. And if so: desist. 

So, while perhaps at times I lean a little towards what my brother-in-law refers to as a model of unholier-than-thou, I think the combined message about priesthood and sainthood is that the saints are those who are what the Orthodox call a window on Christ. We will have all met some in our lives, and indeed by virtue of our baptism and our growth into baptismal vows we are all amongst them, however flawed we are on our journey.

It’s just that when we begin to believe that this is based on our own merits or significance, then we begin to tarnish that very same sainthood.

So on this day when readings about priesthood, sainthood and hypocrisy all mash up, I suggest the simple message is that we take a long hard look at ourselves, check that that selfhood is not particularly glamorous in its own right, and then get on with the job of opening ourself up to the Spirit of the risen servant Christ.

* Name changed to save her family from embarrassment or coyness