dare to hope again

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15^th, 2024

THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT

 

READINGS

 

Zephaniah 3: 14-20

For the Psalm, Isaiah 12: 2-6

Luke 3: 7-18

 

John the Baptist stands out as one of the great prophetic figures of the Christian tradition – slightly ironically because he was of course executed before the birth of Christianity. But I’ll just put that out there for a moment.

John was almost a caricature of his own role. Hell, fire and damnation, or at least the great doctrine of “turn or burn,” was embodied in this one fiery kinsman of Jesus.

We need to hold on to that fiery tradition. Christianity without the intense prophetic voices that have challenged society, rocked complacency from time to time, is Christianity neutered. When our voice is cosy and compliant our soul is stagnant.

But there is another form of unsettling prophesy, strangely enough often equally unpopular; that is the voice that prophesies joy, reconciliation, hope, light. That voice appears for example in the writings of the second Isaiah.

It is the voice that startled William Wordsworth leaving him, as he put it, and CS Lewis later echoed, “surprised by joy.”

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,

That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—

But how could I forget thee?

Wordsworth, or his persona, crippled by grief, finds himself startled by the thought he dared to face memories of his lost daughter, dared to be thankful that she has, while far too briefly, passed through his universe.

Any of you who have lost loved ones, especially loved ones of next generations, your children and grandchildren’s generations, know the depths of that struggle. You may know too the tentative nature of any steps towards new hope, new beginnings, in a life post-trauma. Only those who know that journey can speak of it with integrity, and the rest of us can and must only listen.

But sometimes the loss is collective, not individual. Sometimes whole communities experience loss. The loss of lives in a calamitous event – the earthquake or shootings of Christchurch, the fires that have far too often wiped out whole communities in Australia, Spain, or California, the HIV pandemic of the 1980s, or even the slow erosion of confidence in the farming community, brought about by both unruly climate change and callous market forces.

It is a brave prophet who dares to speak of hope, or joy, in such a context. Such speech must never be plastic, trite, clichéd. Indeed, all speech runs those risks until the speaker shows the resilience of a marathon runner, preparedness to listen, to embed themselves with the hurting hearts he or she addresses.

Zephaniah was such a speaker. He dared to speak of hope from within a devastated community. He dared to speak of restoration when all was lost. While Winston Churchill was no embodiment of Christlikeness there is no doubt that he found the words to transform his British people at a time when hope was unimaginable.

The Māori leadership and citizens of military struggle of Gate Pā (Pukehinahina) in the 1860s, or the non-violent Parihaka resistance in the 1880s, were likewise. Their story thank God is far better known in the 2020s than when I was a privileged Pākehā child in the 1970s. Seemingly lying dormant for a century, these prophetic actions and voices inspired those striving for justice ever since, and are now proclaimed widely

Zephaniah dared to speak of restitution of the fortunes of his people at a time when all was lost. At a time when the place of credible Christian witness in society is crumbling, when we are pushed to the outer edges of social consciousness, I believe we are experiencing our Zephaniah moments. I find it weirdly interesting and exciting to see that there has been no mention of Anne’s election in the Otago Daily Times. The ODT in, for example 1954, dedicated some 850 words, about the length of this sermon, to the election of Bishop Fitchett. By the time Bishop Johnston was elected, 1953, interest had slipped to 275 words. With the exception of the world’s first female diocesan bishop, Penny Jamieson, interest has been minimal ever since.

This is a gift from God: like the child born in a manger, or John his cousin-prophet who leaped in his mother’s womb, we are no longer on the radar.

We are set free to be the people God calls us to be.

We are set free, as Zephaniah foretold, to be a people renewed in divine love, justice, peace, hope, standing with the lame and the outcast wherever God has placed us. We can be a people who, by our behaviour, our prayer, our rites of worship and perhaps our words, can be both surprised by and surprise others, with divine joy once more.

Prepare ye

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8^th, 2024

SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT

 

READINGS

 Philippians 1: 3-11

For the Psalm, Luke 1: 68-79

Luke 3: 1-6

 

Luke constructed his telling of the Jesus story carefully. He wanted to ensure that his listeners knew that Jesus stood in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrews, while simultaneously representing a new, a unique incursion of God into human and cosmic history. Luke’s time scale is less universal than John’s and Mark’s brilliantly ambiguous references to beginnings.

Luke uses a more subtle literary, oratorical device. He addresses his Jesus account, as well as Acts, his account of the miraculous spread of the gospel across the Roman Empire, to a figure named Theophilus. Nothing is known of Theophilus, and I subscribe to a school of thought that suggests he never existed. Luke is giving an air of solemnity by referring to a weighty, socially important recipient of his letter, designed to encourage the listeners that the account is carefully crafted, and the story is reverberating in august circles.

By this he intended to – and succeeded in – giving gravitas to his story, first of Jesus and then of the work of the Spirit, in pushing the history-shattering good news through time and space. But he plays with us – not for the sake of cleverness, but to remind us that the Jesus story transcends time and space.

To return to my much-favoured phrase from Dr. Who, his air of authenticity, anchoring the story in “the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor,” is “timey wimey.” Our time scheme, our BC/AD, “before and after Christ,” that has more recently become BCE/CE, “before or after the common era,” didn’t exist until the sixth century. Luke uses a time scheme that anchors time in relation to the rulers of the Empire.

Using that scheme we would, I think be in the third year of King Charles. Or perhaps the second year of Christopher Luxon.

But it’s less straightforward even than that. Luke uses different and contradictory anchor points for time: as if he wrote “in the 73^rd year of Queen Elizabeth and the fourth year of Christopher Luxon.” That combination does not exist.

John the Baptist appeared in time, yet out of and beyond time, and Luke wants us to know that. It is as if Luke deliberately said we need  to know that the salvation that John was proclaiming, that Jesus brought, is not limited to a select and rarified group but to all who will hear the good news. He pretends he is proclaiming to Theophilus but knows he is proclaiming that news throughout populations and space and time.

News of new truth, new beginnings, new certainties in the hands of the one who will soon receive baptism at the hands of the prickly prophet.

Why does this matter? It matters because Luke was at pains to explain that the ramifications of his message reached far beyond the limitations that the followers of Jesus were wanting to set. That God is a God who moves beyond, outside and around our expectations. It was as if Luke knew, by experience, the ways in which as followers of Jesus would barricade his truths, reconstruct them in images that were more suited to our ideas and prejudices. He did. His people had always erred, and so have we, for we too are Luke’s people, Jesus-people.

He then goes on, largely in Jesus’ own words, to tell the story of the one who breaks our expectations of God. As these next months go on we will journey with Jesus’ mould-breaking teachings, but in the meantime Luke is simply teaching to be alert, ready and willing to have our eyes and ears opened in unexpected ways.

The implications for us are, as individuals, as parish, as diocese, are the same. We are called to be Jesus-followers in many ways that will be unfamiliar to us. Much that we have loved is being dismantled – our infrastructure, our music (as we see today), our place not being the place that we once had in society.

Luke, as he tells the story of Jesus, holds dear the words of the prophet, centuries before: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”