mene as best you can

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (May 5^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

1 John 5: 1-7

Psalm 98

John 15.9-17


We don’t need to be either Einstein or some sort of academic of the sociology of religion to realise that much that is damaging has been done in the name of religion, even in the name of Christ. Corporately as Christians, though for once not necessarily for us each as individuals, a blight on our story. As one who tends to dwell on the negative I’m told that I overemphasise it. That may be my mistake but I don’t certainly want to minimise the impact of the negative witness we have sometimes had.

At the same time I don’t want to shy away from that which has been great in the name of Christ both on the part of the body of Christ as a whole, and on the part of individuals who have inspired greatness, either on a monumental or on a private scale. Those who have inspired us, as well as the great saints who have changed society for the better.

One of them, incidentally, is the source of the writings that we call by the name of John, and which we have been exploring these past weeks since Easter. One scholar rejoicing in the name of Rudolf Schnakenburg (I studied theology for the German names!) made what I think ink is a very accurate claim; , as the heart of John’s good news.he spoke of the verses that I often use at funerals from the chapter before ours today, as Jesus announces himself as the way, the truth, the life.

Jesus is in fact many other things in this Fourth gospel, not least light, which we have been quietly acknowledging since Easter morn with the paschal candle that sits unobtrusively in the sanctuary. Light, that cancels darkness.

The wonderful rented vicarage that I am now inhabiting is pitch black at night, yet the slightest light can help me navigate my way around if I get home late at night or am, as is more often the case, up and about in the wee small hours of the morning.

The slightest light.

So John in telling the Jesus story writes about Jesus as light, as way, as truth, as life. The shadow side of Christian witness that often drowns out that good news is the form of Christianity that uses texts not as a source of joy but as a source of condemnation. I am way, truth, light, life says Jesus, and the moment he says these things and adds “no one comes to the father except through me” the temptation for Christians has been to use his additional words as condemnation. Sorry my friends, but if you don’t tally up with what I consider to be an encounter with Christ, then you miss out on the benefits of salvation. So sad. Too bad.

As my predecessor in my previous role, the ministry educator before me, Alec Clark has often emphasised in gospel conversations, the good news which we too readily suppress, is that there is way, truth, light and life. That this way, truth, light, and life exists despite global warming, global warfare, blocked Whakatipu roadways, rampant inflation, despite even the tragedies through which our life may pass. Way, truth, life exist. And in the passage that we have just read today John goes on to emphasise what the earliest Christians realised was the absolute key ingredient of our response to the encounter with Jesus: the call to love. In John’s account of the Jesus story, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the key verb is abide. Abide in love. Abide in the way, the truth, the light, the life. Abide.

I was incidentally asked by a bride the other day why we no longer use the much-romanticised response “I do” in our wedding services. In recent decades we have opted instead for the more intentional “I will.” In ordination and installation services we add the rider, “God being my helper.” Perhaps we should introduce that to our wedding liturgies?

Intentionality: abide. “If you abide in me,” says Jesus, “and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you.” Not, as I’ve said before “Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz,” but “Lord please equip me with everything I can use to serve and to advertise your way, your truth, your light, your love to the best of my ability.” I guess it’s not quite so catchy and certainly far less cynical in a song.

So in both readings that bear the name John today we hear much about love. Perhaps the best prayer we can send in our own prayer lives is “Lord, help me to love.” The intentionality of which I spoke a moment ago is the key to that ingredient. The word that the author of John frequently users to describe the commitment to Christ, the word we translate as abide, is one of the few that have come directly from Greek into English.

The Greek word, so I can show off, is Mene M-E-N-E. Greek like Māori turns the vowel “e” into something more akin to “eh.” “Mene in me,” Jesus is saying. That “mene” trickled down into English as the second syllable of the word “remain.” Or that’s my theory, and I am sticking to it. Mene in me. Remain intentionally connected to me. Remain connected to me in prayer, in worship, in fellowship with other believers, in fellowship with the scriptures about me, says Jesus. Be intentional.

Do I practise what I preach? Only very poorly, but that I suspect is true of most of us, and fallible though we are, poor advertisements though we may well be, our task is to keep on that intentional remaining, mene-ing in Christ as best we can, with the rider stolen from ordination services, “God be my helper.” Which funnily enough, is precisely the extra dimension that Jesus promises when in the fourth gospel he speaks of the future coming of the Spirit. But for that we shall symbolically wait until Pentecost.

because we glimpse

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 28^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

1 John 7: 7-21

Psalm 22: 25-31

John 15.18

If you will bear with me while I become a little introspective, standing almost in the tradition of testimony, when I came to faith after a few years of grumpy adolescent atheism, I moved briefly in the sort of circles that spend a lot of time condemning people to hell. Such branches of Christianity will spend a whole lot of time focused on the branches that in Jesus’ simple metaphor are trimmed from the vine and cast into the fire.

Such branches of Christianity cannot, if you’ll excuse the almost-pun, see the wood for the trees. The fires of Jesus’ metaphor are to do with gardening and pruning, and not with casting wayward souls into endless torment. If there is anything about purgative fires here it is about finding the parts of our own life that need a little bit of harsh trimming, and not about flinging those with whom we do not agree into sulphuric pits.

I sat, as I hope you can imagine, slightly uneasily with this. I don’t remember the details of the slow transitions that took place thereafter but I know that a large part of them was a remarkable digging into those same writings that we have been travelling through in the weeks since Easter.

We don’t need to be great scholars to realise that the writings that bear the name John are deeply focused on the themes of love and, although the he does not use the word, tenacity. He uses the word “abide” but in the interests of simplicity we’ll set that aside for now. A synonym can be a fine thing.

As a one-time scribbler of poetry, deeply convinced that I was the next James K. Baxter. That was a pipe dream that I eventually surrendered when I faced reality. I discovered anyway that I can’t walk barefoot. But before that I wrote much about love. Lest I lead you astray I was no Shakespeare, nor was my adolescent scribbling or even my early adult scribbling identifiable as love poetry. The greater theme was: “what is love?”

As I also came to dabble in the writings of John, who is of course the recorder of those Jesus words “greater love has no person than this …” I recognise firmly that we are all very early stages apprentices in this profound human narrative.

Allow me to spend the rest of my time here – by which I mean here today, not here in Queenstown for the duration – allow me to spend the rest of the time on 3 brief events of the last 72 hours.

One of the immeasurable privileges of my work is to engage in peak moments of human love. The most obvious form that I’m referring to is of course the privilege of officiating at weddings, or, in this parish, the frequent renewal of wedding vows. Just yesterday I was able to take part in two of these occasions. Being very even handed one was at Saint Paul’s and one at Saint Peter’s. In the first a very western couple, from the United States, renewed vows that they had made 11 or so years before. Amidst the tears and the laughter of the very laid-back but I think holy ceremony their love for one another, for life, and for life together was irrepressible.

Later yesterday I was once again able to be a part of the blessing of a Chinese marriage. I make no secret of the fact that I wrestle with these occasions and have even asked couples after the event whether it is the faith dimension of a church blessing or the romantic Europeanization of love that brings them across oceans and continents for a blessing. Yet almost every time I take one of these moments and do my best to breathe something of God into the clutter of cameras and candles I see love, writ large across each bride’s eager face (and of course dare I admit it, the groom’s patient forbearance).

Yet love is love, that slogan must used at the moment particularly as we wrestle with understanding forms of love that were once beyond the pale. In the church we wrestle with these questions of love knowing that we, in our drawing of lines in the sand may have been more wrong than right. Yet having floated that boat I’m going to leave it adrift on a sea of unanswered questions.

But there was one other incredibly privileged moment these past 72 hours as I found myself, unmerited, marching at the front of the Anzac day parade in Arrowtown. I am, you may remember, a part of the generation of the 70s who watched such gatherings with misguided near-contempt. It was only in the decade or so after that that I began to recognize the courage and the sacrifice that had been entailed in soldiers heading to the other side of the world to fight in a war that none of us could understand. In doing so they, voluntarily or otherwise absolutely committed themselves to the cause, and to the belief that their horrors were experienced in the struggle for a better world for those who followed after them.

As I marched this year, and as I spoke – and might I say far less eloquently than the young high school student who was the chosen speaker – but as I marched and as I spoke I felt deeply that sense that we were there, and we were able to march and remember and feel so freely, because of great sacrifices made in the past. Each year I feel a deep unworthiness: not only have I never struggled in trenches or brutal warfare, but to the best of my knowledge none of my forebears have either – though I acknowledge my cousins-once-removed in Australia who dedicated their working lives to peacetime military service.

These thoughts are (after I’d have to admit another hectic several days) rather random thoughts, but not random, without purpose. For the source of the materials that bear the name John again and again dares to say that where love is God is. And where God is love is. The reverse of that is more nuanced; where hate is God is too, but there God patiently waits and perhaps waits long beyond the reach of time.

Jesus sets down a difficult command: love one another as I have loved you. To a person we have fallen short of his command. But to a person we have seen glimpses, little vignettes in our lives and the lives of those around us that reveal something of that love.

We are called to embody the lessons of those vignettes. For me this past week the irrepressible love of an American couple renewing their vows, the whimsical happiness of a Chinese couple wanting to express something that their original ceremony did not, the immeasurable love of those who allowed their lives to be shattered because they wanted a better world for their descendants. These vignettes give us some glimpse of the task Jesus entrusts us to.

It is my privilege to have those glimpses but you too will know of many similar moments and glimpses of immeasurable love, God’s greatest gift.

lighten our darkness

 

after a long week, with minimal time to prepare, a few random and tangled thoughts about sheep, rams especially, about tragedy, and about stained glass windows. 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 21st) 2024

 

READINGS

 

1 John 3: 16-24

Psalm 23

John 10:11-18

You may be aware of the tragedy this past week, when a Waitākere couple were killed by a rogue ram. Our hearts go out to the next of kin and to all affected by this rare and devastating event.

How far removed this terrible Waitākere event is from the imagery that Jesus is seeking to invoke as he describes himself in terms of Middle Eastern imagery of shepherding. Or is it? The Waitākere event in all its starkness can remind us how cautious we must be in reading scriptures set down two thousand years ago. How vulnerable we are. How vulnerable the gospel and its Christ is.

In the harsh world in which Jesus was living and teaching was far removed from the romantic Europeanised scenes of Jesus, wearing an Anglican alb, walking home through meadows with a lamb on his shoulders. It was a world of danger.

Jesus was not of talking about rams turning feral and killing people. He was speaking of shepherds protecting sheep in a harsh region. There, wolves and lions were a constant threat, and sheep breeds were as tough as nails. 

That world produced brutal instinctive forces, forces that surfaced in the Waitākere tragedy. That tragedy turns our reading upsidedown. 

That horror was possible because sheep in their ancestry had to coexist with fierce predators. Every farmer recognizes the dangers inherent in animals, no matter where they stand on the food chain. My last funeral in one of my parishes was of a farmer killed in a cattle crush by a bull turned rogue. 

Jesus in this “I am” saying places himself in contexts far closer to the protective instincts of feral Waitākere rams than to the romantic scenes of stained glass windows and children’s bibles. He protects - they protect. They protect by attacking a perceived threat - who were in fact the protectors and care-givers of the ram. Life convolutes - and sometimes in convolution we may struggle to find meaning.   

As European Christians – most of us here – we need to put aside our accrued imagery. I’m reminded of the lessons that Anne and I learned in the Northern Territory, as we listened to and read the experiences of Aboriginal people, common to First Nations people from around the colonised world.

As missionaries came to the indigenous people and spoke of shepherds and sheep there was a complete breakdown in communication. What was a shepherd? What was a sheep? What was the relationship between the two?

If I were to speak of this parable in some of the more remote but still europeanised parts of the world, in which stock lived in isolated and vulnerable contexts, I would probably illustrate the shepherding of and by Jesus in terms of Maremma dogs. Originally from ancient Europe, they bond with and fiercely protect vulnerable flocks and herds. They indeed will be prepared to lay down their life for the sheep, though it would have to be a ferocious predator that overcame a Maremma.

Some farmers are rediscovering the benefits of these dogs, as they live out in the paddocks with the flocks, day in, day out. There they reduce if not eliminate predatory carnage. They are not pets, at least in their natural state, but are strongly effective tools.  The ram became the Maremma in thie Waitākere tragedy. But ram got it wrong. The victims were his and his herd's protectors and care givers.

"I am the good Maremma." It does no harm to remind ourselves of the very different world in which Jesus taught. The killer rams with which I opened these thoughts are far closer to the realities of Jesus’ pastoral world than are our stained-glass depictions.

We need to be careful how we interpret and depict ancient scriptures. I am the fierce protective ram. Two years ago I was far less tragically bolted down a hillside by a protective ram; I had not seen him in the paddock next door, where I had gone to rescue a ewe tangled in fencing wire. My good intentions bore no weight with the protective ram. 

It was no new experience for me; as a small child I shared my life with a pet lamb who became a pet ram, and while he was harmless to most people he did take a liking to knocking yours truly over and reducing him to tears on more than one occasion. I remember Jamie with fear and trembling!

I do not want to minimise the tragedy of the Waitākere family so devastated by the loss of not one but two loved ones. But I want to emphasise how raw and rough was the world around Jesus as he spoke of his responsibilities towards his people, towards you and towards me and towards countless others.

The threats faced by those who have chosen the ways of justice and light and life and hope proclaimed in the gospels were not worlds of fluffy ducks, but worlds of all too real risks. In my comfortable world I have to remember that there are countless Christ-bearers, and other justice-bearers, who speak out to proclaim their faith in Christ, or commitment to justice, whether Christ-based or not, at great peril.

Reading this passage in the shadow of the Waitākere tragedy has led me to a place of convolution. The ram becomes the wolf and the would-be care-givers, looking after the flock, become the victims, and lose their lives. Metaphors are dangerous places, but what we must extrapolate is that the Christ who proclaims himself our shepherd will be with us even in the most vulnerable times, the most tenuous and dark circumstances. That is immeasurably good news. But there is inherent in this passage an extra challenge, and that is that we too are called to be advertisements of, bearers of the strength of the shepherd Christ.

I have confessedly led you around in circles as I try to tease meaning in the 21^st century from a profound ancient image. It is an image much watered down by over-use and over-familiarity. The meaning is upsidedown in the light of the Waitākere tragedy. Perhaps all we can say is that the good shepherds themselves were killed in this tragedy; and for that there is precedent. 

The passage works in many ways, culturally dependent. I am, says Jesus the fierce defender-shepherd. I am also, says Jesus, no tame pet. I lay down my life. I go to the darkest places. Our task sometimes is to find that light, bear that light, be that light. 

inconvenient impossible things

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 7^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

1 John 3: 1-7

Psalm 4

Luke 24: 36b-48

I possibly mentioned in passing a week ago, and I certainly have from time to time, a book written by an Australian theologian, a book entitled The Contrast Society of Jesus. The author, Alan Walker, was adamant that the community of Christians should be outstanding by its commitment to compassion and justice, both at a one-to-one level and at a church-to-society level. It has been a long time since I read the book, and I probably should do so again, but his thoughts have never left me.

Also a week ago I mentioned that the author of the little letters of John towards the end of the New Testament as we have it, was struggling because he sensed that the Christ community was losing the quality of its love for one another within the community and its compassion and love for those outside the community.

It could be said that both Alan Walker and John the Evangelist had been singing to themselves that well known if rather often too complacent song “they will know we are Christians by our love.”

The Easter season is hardly the time for us to beat ourselves up with the question “will they?” For now, I think we are offered the great sense of joy that we are loved by the one who some would refer to cynically as our invisible friend.  He, Jesus, we know experientially, or at least believe to be the one who transforms the universal obscenity of death, and its close sibling, grief. We grieve, yes, and we can also be faintly annoyed at our own mortality from time to time – although the prickly Anglican Dean of Dublin, Jonathan Swift masterfully pointed out in Gulliver’s Travels that immortality in our somewhat limited and dare I say it decomposing bodies is not an attractive option.

So we have our moments of grief, but we call to mind especially in this Easter season that we grieve, when we do, and as Paul put it, “not as a people without hope.” Rather “we believe that Jesus died and rose again,” and “even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.” But there is something of a package deal in this transformation of death. Because we are also challenged to believe that the package comes with that other great inconvenience, judgement. More of that perhaps another time, though I would not entirely dismiss it.

But we live with this unfathomable future dimension. Many do in our society, although it will be expressed much more ethereally, as passing over to another side, and certainly any thought of a judging God is rapidly suppressed. Even the words death and dying are considered in most quarters to be far too hot to handle.

Yet, we, with the early Christians are called to believe in the unbelievable. That’s awkward. Or as one somewhat cynical former viewer of our gospel conversations put it the other day as they unsubscribed from our Gospel Conversations of gospel faith, “I don’t want to hear about people popping out of graves.”

No matter how great our doubts, and I confess I'm not an easy believer, I nevertheless do believe that the gospel story is challenging us precisely to believe in an empty tomb, and not for that matter to believe in a stolen body or a cooked-up story. The inconvenience of those resurrection narratives!

I say this because the New Testament Letter of John and the Gospel according to Luke that we have read from today simply take us to those two challenges – neither of which I can claim to have lived up to. Which does not mean incidentally that I'm at this moment going to, as one cleric infamously did in the North Island many decades ago, ceremoniously disrobe myself and exit the room.

By no means, as Paul often said in his writings. No, what it does mean is that I am going to hold to, (or perhaps be held to by the Spirit of God), belief in things akin to the white Queen’s “six impossible things before breakfast.” And because I am held by those six impossible beliefs, or however many it is for me as I remain embraced by the grace and love of God, because I am held by these impossible and inconvenient dimensions of resurrection hope, and of Christ-impelled love and compassion and justice, I will continue to stumble along this strange path of faith much as those first Christians did after they encountered the events that we know as the resurrection appearances of Jesus.

It would of course have been much easier for the gospel writers to mutter something about a ghost, or a social cause that Jesus exemplified that needed to be continued. They didn’t. They invited and continue to invite ridicule by telling stories of a highly tangible if initially unrecognisable Christ, entering closed rooms, eating on beaches, breathing in nostrils, even barbecuing a few fish. They were adamant that the resurrection was a very tangible event, as ridiculous to their first hearers as it is to most of ours.

And while I find it from time to time faintly frustrating, I simply accept that I have to subscribe to that inconvenience, and because of the impact that inconvenience and the teachings and actions of Jesus have on my life I must continue to do my endlessly fallible best to live by acts of compassion and justice and love in the world in which God has placed me.

It is by subscribing to and acting upon these weird and wonderful invitations to …  commissionings to have belief in and action on behalf of Jesus of Nazareth that we may together be in some small way, in our small microcosm of the world, be a contrast Society of Jesus, by the grace of God touching and enabling the transformation of lives around us.

community of love?

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 7^th) 2024 

READINGS

1 John 1: 1 – 2:2

Psalm 133

John 20: 19-31

                                                                          (photo used with parental permission)

To understand John’s letters in the New Testament I believe we need a little bit of background. It probably dates me as a theological student, but I would make no secret of the fact that I am most persuaded by the writings of Roman Catholic scholar Raymond Brown. He argues that the four writings we know as John share a common source. That is the eyewitness accounts of the disciple described cautiously in the fourth gospel as “the one whom Jesus loved.”

It is a beautiful endearing title, and while I'm not one of those that find strands of homosexual longing at any point in the biblical record – that is not an argument for or against recognition of homosexual love today – I find it clear nevertheless that the source of these writings had a remarkably deep relationship with the one we and he call Lord. In the fourth gospel the author, or perhaps more likely oral source of the material written down, could clearly claim a deep knowledge of the interior working of the mind of Jesus. Personally I do not see that as any sort of mystical, in a loose sense, far less sexual, bond. I do see it as closely akin to the relationship between the minds of those who have worked in deeply entwined encounter, such as those in an international sporting team, or those who have served together in military units. Of that I probably need say no more here.

The source of this material that we know as John and one John 2 John 3 John, knew clearly, as Paul does in his writings, that love was the absolute embodiment of all the teachings and actions of Jesus. That love of course was no romantic, though it might include that, no sexual, no limited form of love at all. It was the love that came to be known as agape. I think it is fair to say it is the love that in the Māori language, is aroha, or even arohanui, inexpressibly great love incorporating justice and discipline and work as well as warm feelings of an enriched heart.

For John, as we see in Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, love is the very essence of God, of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and as such should be embodied in the life and witness of the followers of Jesus Christ. This is the love – and its corollary “peace,”  – that the risen Lord imparts in the lives of the gathered disciples, post-Easter. Jesus bestows on them the gift of the one foreshadowed throughout the gospel account as Comforter, called alongside, docked deep in the lives of those who are following Jesus. Docked as deeply in the lives of followers of Jesus as they permit. Again: Paul and John alike are a wakeup to the extent to which we can blot out the gentle voice of divine love amidst the white noise of our busy and often self-centred lives.

Raymond Brown argues that the beloved disciple went on after the resurrection, never denying or marginalising the centrality of the resurrection, to found a community of believers somewhere in the Mediterranean realms that we know as the Middle East, but which in his time was just one more outpost of the often corrupt Roman Empire.

In an attempt to make this Jesus community a counterculture to empire corruption, John emphasised Jesus’ rule and embodiment of love. To what extent did this community emulate and practice the love revealed in the story, and behind the story the life and teachings and actions of Jesus, the one he provocatively calls “Word made flesh”?

Sadly, like most of us, the members of John’s community were human. Jesus breathed peace and love and justice into the nostrils of his followers in the locked room that he entered. To be recipients of this love, this perfect love, is to dwell in the light and to be persons and a people in whom there is no darkness at all. Perhaps as an old man the Beloved Disciple had become separated from his community, but somehow he learns that all is going wrong, and in the little epistles 1, 2, and 3 John we find him, like Paul, for example in his letters to the Corinthians, becoming increasingly strident as he realises that they are not, as perhaps we sometimes are not, the people of peace and love and justice they were called to be.

By the end of John’s writing career (as it were) he is running out of words. Like Paul again, he longs to be with his people to attempt to correct them as they fall short of the standards that he expects of them. “Beloved, do not imitate what is evil but imitate what is good,” he writes. “Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.”

What then for us? Despite the recipients of the letters of Paul and John alike clearly falling short of the writers’ expectations, the letters survive. We would say that as part of the workings, miraculous workings, of God’s, Spirit, that same Comforter who moved on the face of the deep at creation and was shall we say re-breathed into the nostrils of the disciples in the locked room. That we have the writings we call scripture is a gift of God. In the case of Paul and John alike the author probably gave up the task of writing feeling that his communities had fallen apart – much I might add as we might think the church we have loved is falling apart in the 21st century. 

Yet we have those writings.

In the mystery of God, and probably without the knowledge of the human authors of our scriptures, those writings came to be handed down to guide us, in itself a sign that ultimately they guided their first recipients. Someone, perhaps several someones, treasured the writings, handed them on, and we have them, as Christians have had them for 2000 years. Like the first recipients we have sometimes ignored, abused or belittle them, yet still they speak.

We too are a horribly imperfect people. Were the Beloved Disciple composing a letter to us today it might be strident too. Nevertheless our task over and again is to allow the piercing light of Christ, the risen Christ, to penetrate our own darkness – which because we’re probably not terribly important compared to a Trump or Putin, is more a fuzzy greyness than true darkness. Nevertheless we are called to allow Christlight to penetrate our darkness individually and collectively so that we too can be bearers of justice, and peace, and hope, and light – and more – in the communities into and through which the Spirit guides us.

Cloudy God, Fast God

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 17^th) 2024

 

READINGS

Hebrews 5: 1-10

Psalm 119:9-16

John 12: 20-33

 

[The wondrous thing about the small slice of the letter or, I suspect, sermon to the Hebrews that we have read from [at St. Peter’s] is that it can be made to mean almost anything. There is a long-standing tradition when persons are ordained of delivering them a congratulatory card, reminding them that they are “a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” 

The "who/what" of Melchizedek aside, beyond a fleeting Hebrew Scripural mention, tbere is a truth in the cards doled out to neo-phyte clergy. Yes, in orthodox theology that are priest forever in some way, but they were on the day before their ordination as well. The English and Latin languages have done us a great disservice, for different Greek words for priesthood have slid into Latin and English usage, but I can safely say that it is the intention of the church that those of us who wear our collars back to front are not priests in any different way to the way in which you the people of God are priests, and that is the priesthood into which we are baptised.

We are of course baptised into Jesus and he fulfils the priesthood that the author of Hebrews is cryptically writing of. You and I in exactly the same way, regardless of our neck apparel, participate in that priesthood. There will be more of that on other occasions, but basically the unfortunate English word describing the “priesthood” into which I am ordained and you are not has nothing to do with the priesthood of Melchizedek.

But although I primarily want to talk about the gospel reading, and briefly at that, it is always worth checking the ways in which we can distort scripture. In the gospel reading the focus is the glorification of the true priest. There the word in Greek is hieros, from which we get hierarchy, the ordained priesthood with unfortunate collars is depicted by the  word presbuteros, from which akmost ironically we get the word Presbyterian. 

I remember well my head of seminary thumping the desk and exclaiming there must be no hieros, no hierarchy in the church.

But of course there is in our denomination. It’s just that there shouldn’t be. And I’ve made that clear as mud. Enough.]

What is of this glorification of which Jesus speaks? Very little in John’s account of the gospel is weightless, and  “glory” is one of his key words. John depicts a scene foreshadowing in which God extends divine relationship with the Jews to a relationship of God  with all people.

Most of us belong in that category.

It is outsiders who have come longing to see Jesus. It is to primaril them that Jesus addresses his thoughts on glorification.

“Glory” in the Hebrew scriptures was the sign and prerogative of God. Jesus begins talking to the Greeks about it in the context of prediction of his own suffering and death. Something very strange is going on. To the Greeks the concept of a God suffering was impossible. To the Jews, as we will see in Paul’s writings, the possibility of God’s death on what Paul calls a tree, a wooden cross, was obscene.

Jesus here sets out to identifies himself with God and God with impossibility, even obscenity.

We will be doing a lot of hard work in our liturgy over the next two weeks. Next week we will, though for most of the last 20 centuries the church has forgotten it, look at the way in which we have sought God in the wrong places. 

Certainly, yes, the Hebrew scriptures speak of the glory of God, the shekinah, in a pillar of fire by night and cloud by day, majestic and terrifying. As I was wonderfully reminded during my all too short sojourn in the Northern Territory, there is little that is more majestic than cumulonimbus clouds soaring tens of thousands of metres into the air. Bright light of any sort in the night sky, such as the terrifying grandeur of a volcanic eruption, or God forbid the towering inferno of a high rise building caught alight, are a deeply unsettling sight

Yet Jesus turns the gaze of the Greeks and Jews alike elsewhere. Next Sunday we will enact the desire to see him enter our world and overthrow corruption. If I can find some palm branches in time, we will at least symbolically cast them before his feet, as he comes to our place, comes as a conqueror. Then he will turn that our expectations upside down, for he will come in peace, and will continue in death.

Even the great passing miracle of the resurrection which we will finally encounter on Easter day will be something no newspaper of the time, no cameras, no human eye could capture. God is too fast to be captured, as the poet R. S. Thomas reminds us.

We have much work to do these next two weeks, as we journey towards the moment in which Jesus is lifted up from the earth and begins the whisper that he is drawing all people – people far beyond the boundaries that we like to set – to him.

God does not carry a flag

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,
FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT
(March 10^th) 2024

 

READINGS

Numbers 21: 4-9

Psalm 107:1-8

John 3: 14-21

 

In a number of editions of the bible the probable sayings of Jesus are  marked in red. By doing this edir=tors in once sesese helpful, in that they, with some guesswork, separate Jesus from the editors of his and narrators of his life. The process was somewhat spurious, but it can help us generate the remarkable vision of Jesus from the increasingly restrctibe frames of his followers. That was not the intention of the editors!

But if we reconize that there are both Jesus satings the narators' saying in the text then it can soon be seen that the overall emphasis of Jesus is that of welcome and embrace, rather than rejection and exclusion that has so often been the narrative of Christians.

As it happens it is that insight at least in part that gave rise to one of the more significant theological works of recent decades, when Croation theologian Miroslav Volf wrote his influential volume Exclusion and Embrace. Volf studied under my own favourite theologian, Jürgen Moltmann. I tell you all this not to show off but to put this family as it were of interpreters into a context.

Moltmann and Volf alike were exposed to human darkness. Moltmann was a prisoner of the allies during World War 2, although his reflections were primarily borne not of his experiences as a prisoner but on his recognition of the ways in which his people, especially the German Christian people, failed to see the evil growing in their midst. Volf similarly saw the brutality of Serbo-Croatian racial conflict, and the ethnic cleansing, that, like that of Hitler's pogrom, wreaked havoc and slaughter across his native lands of the former Yugoslavia.

Any theology, indeed any faith, that wrestles with brutality and evil and darkness of this depth is never going to be superficial. Speach of the light of Christ coming into the world after the slaughter of thousands, is obscene. Or it is unless it drives deep into the questions of where God is in times of deepest darkness, and unless it is backed up by prophetic action and attitude.

No comfortable or superficial answer will suffice, and a nine minute reflection in the context of a Eucharist in a comfortable country will not scratch the surface of the surface. 

So I can do little more than to drop hints borrowed from both Moltmann and Volf, though I am an inadequate and superficial reader of both. But in the face of bitter division in the cultures of the europeanized world, the internal conflict growing in the United States, the brutal conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the seemingly endless bitter hatred between Israel and its neighbours, we cannot remain complacent. We cannot speak glibly of a light that shines in darkness.

Moltmann’s unforgettable emphasis when reading the gospels was that the work of the Incarnation, the drawing of God into the heart and breath of humankind, that the extent of that work is clear only when Jesus himself, when God’s own self cries out in absolute Godforsakenness in the darkness of Good Friday.

We will to some extent explore the depth of that cry, the depth of that descent into human hell in the liturgies of Holy Week. We are not there yet. Nevertheless, for those of us who have been exposed to the Christian journey of faith we know it’s coming.

In the light of this descent into the depths of human darkness Moltmann emphasised that there is no place where Christlight does not shine. Lest that be some sort of cosy Linus blanket for us, he emphasised too that there must be no place, no difficulty, into which we should hesitate in bearing Christ light. 

I speak as one who lives a cosy life. I try however to grapple with and respond to the facts that Christ is present in deepest darkest hell holes such as Gaza, or the eastern borders of Ukraine. Present too in the loneliness of victims of police brutality. That brutality that is often championed by those crying out with plastic hypocrisy, "Lord, Lord," or who speak out of obscene Christian nationalism. God does not carry a flag. 

If Christianity in any form does not speak out in the face of brutality and oppression then it is, to borrow a German word, ersatz Christianity, a French word, faux Christianity, or arguably an English word, counterfeit Christianity.

Volf saw this too. As he looked at Christian communities dwelling in the comfort zones of the West he recognised that the popular face of Christianity was one that tended to exclusion, to pushing away the vulnerable, victimised,  oppressed, broken peoples of God’s earth. He saw the persecution and near-genocide of ethnic minorities of the former Yugoslavia. He dared Christians, and continues to do so, to speak out dangerously where there is hatred. To do so whether that hatred be in the name of ethnic otherness, faith-otherness, gender or sexuality otherness, or any other form of darkness.

When Jesus spoke of the Son of Man being lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness, he was speaking of his own vocation to go into the deepest darkest places of human experience. Not for Jesus the cosy complacency of religious surety – which is incidentally the reason I hesitate ever to include “Blessed Assurance” in my hymn lists, however devoted its author and singers mean to be.

No. Jesus was not comfortable with the comfort zones of believers. Jesus was adamant that the Way of the Cross takes us into the darkest ills of human experience.

Given the vicissitudes of birthplace and parentage it is unlikely I and possibly you will follow Jesus into those darkest places. Some of us may experience the personal hells of bereavement, betrayal, loneliness or just common human doubt. It is hard to measure the intensity of hell. But we are the ones who must stand under the judgement that Jesus speaks of,  if we choose to prefer complacency and selfishness to the tough claims of the way of the cross. We are called to open our lives up to embrace, and not exclude, those on the fringes of our s
ociety or of world politics.

Few of us will have to be terribly brave in our lives, and often we will fail, but the story of the New Testament and indeed of the whole biblical record is the story of those who fail yet feel the nudge of God, allow themselves to be picked up, and stumble on again.

On this Lenten journey, as life stands at the moment, few of us are in the places of darkness addressed by a Moltmann or a Volf or a Jesus as he confronted the depths of religious hypocrisy. But we are called to open ourselves up to that possibility, and to the demand of the cross that we live lives of authenticity, of compassion for the suffering and excluded, of embrace to the lonely. And lest I fall into the very cosy complacency of which I speak I too am reminded that I preach not to you but to me and you and us alike.