glory in the dark

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and at St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
(May 18^th) 2025

  

READINGS

 

Psalm 1482012 04 06 2240a

Revelation 21: 1-6

John 13: 31-35

 

As a small boy growing up in Africa and England, and then in the bleak realms of a New Zealand boarding school, I was terrified of the dark. Perhaps I still am, but more of that later.

If we were hearing the entire gospel as told by John, we would moments ago have heard his telling narrative comment “It was dark.”

Darkness is such a visceral place for human beings. I remember those childhood terrors of the night. The sounds of the unknown from somewhere outside.

I was a ridiculously hypersensitive child. It didn’t stop as I entered adulthood. I don’t think it ever stopped. By now many of you will know, because I mention it ad nauseum, I will after leaving you head off for my circumnavigation of Australia. Much of it I have covered before, covered it in the same way, sleeping in tents, in a car, on a swag, even on the roof of the car. To do so is to feel the pressure of the night and its loneliness. What is out there just beyond the edge of the light?

But not just Australia’s vast lonely places! To be alone in vastness is always confronting. My trip is not particularly dangerous at all, but the human psyche does not always deal in realities. 

Urban landscapes too can be places of terror, sometimes rightly so. There are many parks I would not cross or roads I would not traverse in the darkness of the night. The Whakatipu is one of few places on earth that I’ve meandered around night time streets without my heart in my mouth.

Ironically that has more to do with socio-economic factors. Low crime because low desperation, because low degrees of random violence on the roads and lanes of these towns. I can name many places in New Zealand and Australia where, in the words of Simon and Garfunkel, I would not wander after dark. I can think of places I would not wander by day, too, though mainly overseas, for we are spoilt here.

It was dark, John tells us. Dark because Jesus is about to confront, even be overcome, by demons of jealousy, disappointment, hatred and a legion more. It was dark. Yet Jesus speaks of love and glory. The  word “glory” draws heavily on the pillar of fire, the light in the darkness, that once guided the people of God through the Sinai wilderness.

And here we are in the Easter celebration season, with altar cloths of white and gold and hymns full of light and joy, yet John tells us it was dark. I even double checked to make sure I had the right readings. The psalm is full of joy, the anthem full of joy, the Revelation reading full of future joy. “It was dark” is not the final word.

This is a brief reminder of the places into which Jesus went to complete his work that we call salvation. We can’t grasp the magnitude of the descent that he made in those 24, 36 hours. On Easter morning we celebrate the darkness being overcome by light. Turn on our news feeds and we know that the darkness remains astronomically great in Gaza, Myanmar, the Sudans. Or in Eastern Europe, and now the India-Pakistan borders, where temporary ceasefires and prisoner swaps may be no more than a parenthesis in hostility.

As the Fourth Gospel was being written the author was not lounging back with a glass of port and a fine cigar. He and most of the New Testament writers knew terror, knew their own vulnerability, the precariousness of their position. They knew these things far more then I will in a quiet jaunt around the remote roads of Australia – though I hasten to add there are one or two places I would not sleep in the back of my car or in a roadside tent.

The New Testament writers knew vulnerabilities each day far more akin to Gaza than my small-boy experience of a twig tapping on the outside of my bedroom window, or the spine-tingling chills of a deserted night time car park.

John speaks these words “it was night” before, immediately before, going on to tell of the glorification, of the unending undefeatable love revealed in Jesus’ last 36 hours.

Because the extent of the glorification of Jesus, the extent of that love is only made complete in those 36 hours. While we will face darknesses, and our sisters and brothers not only in Christ but in the human race face darknesses day by day, our forebears in faith were adamant that these were not the final word.

As a people of the light, John recalls Jesus saying, we must be a people of love.

That commission to be a people of love, of light, is given by Jesus after the resurrection. Only after Jesus has gone through the deepest valleys can light and love be anything but an apparition. Until then the tapping of the twig on the window, or the explosions of military missiles, these drown out all signs of hope. Jesus challenges and empowers us to be in our small ways bearers of light and love. In that way we communicate the glory that transforms every darkness, become bearers of the pillar of fire that enlightens every darkness.

Jesus and the Buddha

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

No tiger, but ... the best I can do

EVE of St JAMES (July 24^th) 1988

 

“Anyone who wants to be great amongst you must be your servant”

 

The Buddha told the following story to one of his disciples:

Once upon a time, long ago, there lived a king who had three sons. They were like young gods to look at.

One day the king was relaxing in a park. The three sons left the king and their servants and wandered around the park together until they came to a large thicket of bamboo. Two of the princes expressed fear of wild beasts – though fear at different levels – but one expressed only excitement and hope at what might befall him in this place.

Asked the Prince strolled about amongst the bamboo they came upon a tigress, surrounded by her five seven-day-old cubs. She was exhausted by hunger and thirst, and unable to hunt for food.

The first brother, who had earlier expressed fear of meeting wild beasts in the thicket, remarked that if the animal did not soon find food she and her Cubs would perish. The second brother, who had earlier expressed not so much the fear of death at the hands of wild animals, but rather the fear of separation in death from those he loved, this brother wondered aloud how the poor animal might find food.

But the third brother cast himself down in front of the tigress so that she might devour him. When she proved to be not strong enough to kill him as he lay there he cut his own throat and collapsed to die at her feet. She devoured him, and received the strength she needed to live and to give life to her cubs.

The Buddha concluded the story,

It was I who at that time and on that occasion was the prince.

 

When the mother of the sons of Thunder came to Jesus seeking greatness for her sons she received an unexpected response. Jesus took the request of the mother of two of his disciples – an entirely reasonable response in his culture – and used it to drive home to his followers A radical message that lies close to the heart of his teachings.

Whoever would be great amongst you must be your servant.

 

It is for our purposes today a happy coincidence that the Buddha in his teachings sought to communicate the same theme, and provided such a vivid illustration of it. The Buddha’s tale, if gory, is hard to misinterpret.

The church that our Lord called to being in the world is a servant church. It is called to serve the world. I hear too little of this as I hear church strategists planning the new way forward into the coming century. We are called to be a servant people. It is not our task to gain a position of power in the community, and from that position to make pronouncements on issues of ethics or morality.

We are called not to remain silent in the face of injustices. We must speak out on behalf of the exploited and the abused. But in order to do that we need not attempt to regain some kind of mediaeval strength. Strength is not the way of the cross. The Crusades slaughtered countless innocents in the name of Christianity, but such is not the way of the cross. American military strategists seek to argue for disarmament from a position of military supremacy, but such is not the way of the cross. The cross is not a symbol of power, in which we should conquer, but rather a sign of powerlessness in which God conquers turning evil to good, tears to joy.

The church, then, is not called to be powerful. It's going to be a servant church imaging for the world the ironic powerlessness of Jesus before Pilate. Like the church, we as Christians are called to announce strategies of power and seek instead to imitate Christ’s outspoken powerlessness. In that way we can begin to be a servant church. We as Christians are called to be Christlike.

We are called to be Christ’s body and blood in the world, like the young incarnation of the Buddha providing our lives to be the food by which those around us may be given life.

Go, prophesy

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

ORDINARY SUNDAY 15 (July 10^th) 1988

 

It was Yahweh who said … “Go, prophesy to my people Israel”

                                                                        (Amos 7:15)

Shake off the dust from under your feet

                                                                        (Mark 6:11b)

 

A friend of mine was once standing in the foyer of the Main Building of our university. He was a new Christian, and a Charismatic, boiling within with the desire to communicate his new found faith to all and sundry. As he stood there in the foyer he watched a group of loud and aggressive mail students behaving in the way that only loud and aggressive male students can. And as he watched them he agonised with himself, “what is holding me back from telling these people about Jesus?”

Now I don’t wish to propose that my friend would have achieved any significant results had he done what he was considering, rushing up to the strangers and ear-bashing them with his beliefs. It may well have been good human psychology, otherwise known as common sense, that held him back. But I do want to stress that his heart was in the right place. His desire to communicate Jesus to the world around him was a real and burning one and for that he was to be commended. Let us leave him in the foyer for a while.

In their wisdom the compilers of the lectionary, by which our readings are chosen each week, have seen fit to describe the theme of this week’s worship as the theme of “faithfulness.” Now I beg to differ (as is often the case). For I find a far stronger theme underlying each of our readings today, and it is a theme that we ignore only at great peril. For in each of our readings we find the central figure, author or actor in the drama, recognizing the distinctive flavour of their faith, knowing it to be something about which there is a sense of urgency and excitement, and knowing it to be something that must be proclaimed to the world around them. In each reading we find the compulsion, the urgency of the responsibility of God’s people to proclaim God’s lordship to the world. And these people of God are no superstars, no Rambos of their religion, but ordinary people. Says Amos,

I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son,

But  I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees;

The Lord took me from following the flock,

and the Lord said to me, “Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”

 

Amos was a simple shepherd, with none of the normal qualifications of one who might be recognised by society as a suitable mouthpiece of God. He was a simple shepherd, but one who lived in a time of great complacency and comfort. And he was not too simple to see clearly that the comfort extended only to those who belonged to the middle and upper classes of his society. One might be reminded for example, of the “two Britains” of Thatcherism, which in the south flourishes at the expense of a largely neglected north. Or we might care to look closer to home, to find comparisons in our own community, for here too sectors of the community may benefit at the expense of others from the policies of our leaders.

But in seeing the injustices, Amos knew himself to be called to act. Writes one scholar,

He savagely assails the oppression of the poor and the cheating of the poor … the corrupt judicial system which denied them any hope of attaining justice … With equal vehemence he attacked the pampered upper classes … who could not have cared less for the plight of the poor.

                 John Bright, Covenant and Promise: the Prophetic Understanding of the Future in Old Testament Israel (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), 83.

 

Again, in Mark’s gospel we find a subtle warning against complacency and comfort amongst the people of God.

When you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place.

Mark, the earliest gospel writer, is warning his people against the dangers of social climbing. If our first hosts live in squalor, nevertheless their hospitality must be seen to surpass all comfort, and the gospel visitor must not accept opportunities to move out to more luxurious surroundings.

The point that both Mark and Amos grasp so strongly is the sense of compulsion that we as servants of God are under to proclaim God’s message to the world. Without personal benefit. Martin Luther’s famous maxim was, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” Do no other but to proclaim the standards of faith and justice to the world and to the church that we believe to be essential to relationship between God and humanity. Our Archbishop[1] frequently makes the statement that a church that is not on about evangelism, or proclamation as I prefer to call it, is not a church at all.

So we are left with two questions for ourselves at St. John’s, East Bentleigh: are we on about evangelism, and related to that question, what forms of evangelism are appropriate for us to embrace?

Even our reading from Ephesians today, that glorious hymn of praise to “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” fits our theme here, for the author of those words, who may or may not have been Paul, has seen passionately the power in which we as Christians operate within the world God gave us. Incidentally, if you ever encounter Jehovah’s Witnesses at your door claiming that belief in the Trinity has no biblical foundation, you could do worse than to refer them to this passage in Ephesians. Few passages are more clearly trinitarian in their language, and few are more celebratory of the power that the Trinity can have in human lives.

In him you also, who have heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him [the Son] … were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.

 

This writer saw Christians as a distinctive people with a belief worthy of enthusiasm and excitement. We have a message to proclaim. We are possessors of a distinctive belief, a distinctive relationship with God. We are a people sealed at our baptism with the Spirit, and that same Spirit has drawn near to us to be our comforter and to be our strength, literally our pneumatic force.

This thought brings me back to my friend in the university foyer. As he stood there in the foyer he at least knew only too well that he had a task to perform. Had he spoken to the group of macho males he may or may not have achieved tangible results, and those results if tangible may or may not have furthered the cause of the Kingdom. For the moment such niceties are irrelevant. The point is he knew he had a task to perform.

And so again the questions we must ask ourselves at St. John’s are the same as those faced by my friend. Are we or am I on about evangelism, and if so, what is effective evangelism in our life situation? What do we understand evangelism to be, and are we doing it? Does God, Father, Son, and Spirit, excite us, or do we as church, men and women, simply belong to another community service club?

Finally, I want to make it quite clear that I do not believe that what my friend was about to do – and didn’t – in the foyer of that university would have been an effective form of evangelism. Indeed, I do not believe that much of what the church in this and other dioceses is on about today is effective evangelism. But I do believe in evangelism, and I do believe that if you and I together do not spend some time together in the coming months grappling with the two questions I have raised then we will have no future as a church, as a community of faith.

Those questions again are “are we on about evangelism,” and “what is effective evangelism in this situation?”

May I leave you with a final thought? I began with the text “shake off the dust from under your feet.” But we cannot shake off the dust that is on our feet if there is no dust on them.

---

[1] David Penman, Archbishop of Melbourne 1984-1989.

eternal contrast

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and at St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER 

(May 11^th) 2025

 

READINGS

 

Psalm 23

Revelation 7: 9-17

John 10: 22-30

 

Before I begin exploring the shepherding metaphor that Jesus plays with, as he speaks to his disciples no doubt, but speaks primarily to the sceptical, on-looking religious hypocrites, standing nearby, waiting to trap him ... before all that I think we have to glance at the perilous dangers of the Book of Revelation.

I must advertise that, on Thursday, now our Lenten studies have morphed into Easter studies, and have become Thursday studies not Wednesday studies so that yours truly can spend a little more time lying on the Otago beaches sipping pina coladas, on Thursday, if you wish to know more about the sayings in the Book of Revelation and elsewhere, the studies are both informative and enjoyable. Or at least so I'm told. Or told myself. I hope they are.

Biblical sayings that are somewhat icky to a modern mind, sayings about washing in blood, need explanation, need translation, need to take their own Doctor Who journey from 1st century eastern Mediterranean cultures, especially Jewish culture, to the cultures of downtown or up country Kiwiland. 

So yes, I recommend an excursion to our Wednesday Lenten studies now happening in the Easter on a Thursday. Thursday at 10:00, in the Saint Paul’s cottage … in which we will dip our toes once more into Anne’s book about atonement, and perhaps even into my book on the Book of Revelation. Just saying! 

There are apocalyptic passages throughout the scriptures and to understand them in our own era we need to be licensed! In saying this I've ignored 500 years of post-Reformation history/ But to traverse these passages, while avoiding the land mines, we need training. 

Sorry Martin Luther, John Calvin and others, but to the unwary these passages can be emotionally and psychologically destructive. Like a Maserati or Lamborghini they are dangerous weapons in the hands of the unskilled or unthinking.

So we leave the Book of Revelation alone for a while. We may pick up hints of it on Thursday, those of us who gather. But now let’s turn instead to Jesus’ careful conversational ploys as he speaks to a crowd who embody religious hypocrisy, and are listening to him only in order to trap him. 

And let me say in passing, the moniker “the Jews,” which has been so destructive through two thousand years of Christian history needs, like icky apocalyptic passages, to be treated like a land mine. Any person who converses in order to outmanoeuvre, bamboozle, trap, or oppress co-conversationalists is never going to be a bearer of Christ light.

This cannot but bring me back to John and his carefully crafted gospel account. Bishop Kelvin, in a gospel conversations made clear that we need to locate this scene of Jesus in the temple both geographically and chronologically, both in space and time.

Throughout John’s account of the Jesus story he uses powerful metaphors. One of the most powerful is that of light entering into and overcoming darkness. While that metaphor is not directly used here it provides several clues as to what is going on. Jesus is undertaking the difficult task of confronting spiritual hypocrisy, spiritual darkness. Shining a light of truth. I am the Good Shepherd, he said, famously, in the passage just before this. 

The scene takes place at a time and location when the mind of Jewish people was much focused on release from dark passages, restoration from dark moments in their own history. If you were to take a trip to Darwin, which as many of you know is one of my favourite places on earth, and made your way to the Anglican cathedral, you would find incorporated into a relatively modern and architecturally tropical cathedral one much older structure. It is a wall, all that remains of a previous cathedral. That building which survived being hit by a bomb and by looters during the bombing of Darwin in 1942, was destroyed sometime after midnight mass in 1974 as cyclone Tracy re-flattened the city. The wall was incorporated into the building that rose from that rubble, just as one small section of the first temple was incorporated into the second temple in which Jesus was standing. Solid, unshakeable remnants, continuity of the new with the old.

Sadly incidentally, the Anglican cathedral in Napier, destroyed by earthquake was not significantly incorporated into the building that rose from its rubble – and indeed that architecturally brutalist building is now threatened by post Christchurch earthquake bureaucracy. But perhaps that’s another story. Whether the sorry sight of the Christchurch cathedral is another story is yet another story! It seems to me imperative that something of the old, now crumbling, pigeon infested cathedral be incorporated into a new thing, a new place of promise, rather than being like-for-like rebuilt as a monument to human myopia. But I digress again. Perhaps. 

If the onlookers were seeking to trap Jesus then he gave them plenty of material. It can only be surmised that he did this on purpose, forcing them to embrace their own hypocrisy. He set out by likening himself to the great King David, depicting himself as a shepherd in ways that could not fail to resonate with those well versed in the Hebrew scriptures. 

Well versed of course does not necessarily mean well attuned to. It is often said that the devil knows the scriptures well, and while I do not believe in a physical devil I do believe in the power of the demonic to twist and disfigure goodness in the service of evil. Adolf Hitler knew only too well how to impress the Christians of Germany in the 1930s.

Jesus went further still. Not only did he claim the status of King David, he went on to claim greater status. “I and the father are one." In Matthew’s gospel account you will find  at least two occasions widows observing Jesus rend their garments, a sign of abject horror. John reserves that gesture to the soldiers executing Jesus who instead rend his garments. But had Matthew been telling of this scene he undoubtedly would have had the religious hypocrites flamboyantly rending their garments in a dramatic show of their piety. 

The sort of pious pretentiousness that one might exhibit by holding a Bible upside down on the steps of a church proclaiming a deep love for its message while practising the opposite in almost every public pronouncement and action. Let, as the writers of apocalyptic were wont to say, let the reader understand, the listener hear.

The claims of Jesus would not be with us today if they had not been authenticated first by the beyond comprehension event of the resurrection and second by the authenticity of his appearances post-Easter to those very same followers who, the women excepted, had let Jesus down so badly. Their lives were turned around. They became embodiment of authenticity, embodiment of integrity. They demonstrated the depth to which they had come to know the shepherd who had confronted religious hypocrisy and in incomprehensible ways defeated its darkness.

My hunch is that the religious hypocrites went away that day feeling pretty smarmy and self satisfied. Yes again they had trapped this troublemaker, building up a dossier of reasons for which to execute him. Jesus was more interested in the eternal contrast he would draw, at great risk to himself, between hypocrisy and integrity.  

It is a testimony to the truth that we speak of Jesus with love and awe today while the perpetrators of evil, though repeated in every generation disappear into the dark murky backwaters of history. May we stand in the light, to stretch a metaphor, as sheep beckoned and transformed by the Christ of the cross.

here your proud waves shall break

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH
ORDINARY SUNDAY 12 (June 19^th ) 1988
 

 

Come thus far, I said, and no further: here your proud waves shall break.

                                           (Job 38:11)

 

There is an awful lot of water in today’s readings. And yet we should not be surprised at this. There are few symbols in ancient thought more powerful then the two great symbols of fire and water. Both are symbols pregnant with meaning, pregnant with the daily experience ancient cultures would have had of those elements as simultaneously powerfully destructive and powerfully creative forces. Few symbols could more accurately convey to rustic tribal peoples the oar and majesty, the creativity and terror of God.

Water, which shall be our focus today, is for example both the destroyer of the world at the time of the Flood, yet at the same time the means by which the world was redeemed from its bent towards degradation and self-destruction at that time. Water at the time of the Exodus is the agent by which the Egyptians are destroyed, and at the same time the agent by which the children of Israel are delivered. In Christian thought, water is a vital symbol of our death at baptism, but it is also a symbol of our rebirth. In water we die to sin but are reborn in the possibilities of the Kingdom of God.

As an aside it should also be noted that rivers represent a powerful symbol of the experience of death and judgement in Greek and in mediaeval Christian thought. At death one descends to the River Styx, or to the Lethe, the first a river that must be crossed, and the second a river whose waters induced forgetfulness of the past, deep within the underworld.

So the sea was frequently a thing of terror to the people of Israel. It is no accident that the great apocalyptic vision of the coming world in the Apocalypse of John affirms with joy,

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.
The first heaven had disappeared now,
and there was no longer any sea.

More, then, the surprise when the psalmist rejoices,

                      Those who go down to the sea in ships
                      and follow their trade on great waters,
                      these men have seen the works of God
                      and his wonders in the deep.
 

What the psalmist has recognised is terribly important. So often we seem to see God as present only in the things we see to be good. God created, shall we say, the sunshine but not the hurricane, the butterfly but not the European wasp. So often we want to see God only at the level of all time nice guy, the God of “all things bright and beautiful,” but cannot cope with the notion that seemingly bad things occur within the creativity of God. So many Christians lose their faith when all is no longer sun and roses.

It is imperative that we accept the bad with the good within God’s creation. To return to our symbol of water, it is obvious that water is an element that we cannot survive without, and yet at the same time water has the power to destroy us, even to destroy our economy. There was a dark side at creation as well as a light side; life can and must consist of suffering as well as joy.

And yet the doctrine of creation, the belief that God created all things, implies for us an enormous message of hope. If God created all things, made possible the processes by which the earth and the universe have come to take the shape they now have, then God is equally in control of all things. God is the source of the energies of the universe, the source of the orderliness of the universe.

I hear so much that passes for Christian teaching that is no more than some Pagan belief in a struggle between a good God and an evil demon-figure. Proponents of this kind of teaching claim to believe that they know the outcome of this Titanic struggle in advance, for it is written in scripture, but it is an outcome known only to the elect, and of benefit only to the elect. The remainder, according to this form of teaching, will remain unfortunate prisoners and subjects of a powerful and evil being, the devil.

Such thought gives far, far too much kudos to the power of evil in our midst, far too much glory, ironically, to the being we might know as the devil. Tragically it also detracts from the magnificence of God.

So once more I draw your attention to those few lines from the Book of Job. The speaker asks,

Who pent up the sea behind closed doors
when it leapt tumultuous out of the womb,
when I wrapped it in a robe of mist,
and made black clouds its swaddling bands?
Come this far, I said, and no further.
Here your proud waves shall break.

 

Even the catastrophes of nature then, even the most terrifying forces of the natural realm are within the control of the creator. Now as Christians we must add to that clear Old Testament message the New Testament message of the Cross. To the good news of Jewish theology that God is utterly in control even of the most terrifying forces of the world is added the Easter message that even the seemingly utter disaster of death is transformed into resurrection, transformed into unendingly good news.

That is why our gospel reading today depicts Jesus as having command over the elements, over the storm. Jesus the Son is to be identified with God, has control over creation in the same way that God the creator has control over nature – and shares likewise in the power to transform the tragedy of death into the mystery of eternal life.

That message can, sadly, be turned into something cheap and facile. Because God has absolute control, absolute power, we can choose to neglect the important social, economic and political, even the environmental issues of our day. We can say as some fatalistic Muslims do, “it is the will of God.” To do so would be irresponsible. God has given us the responsibility to tend this earth, as we hear in one version of the great Eucharistic Prayer at the Communion. God has given us the responsibility to see Jesus in our neighbour, as we learn from the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  God has called us to continue the work of Jesus in his absence, as we learn from our belief that the Son ascended to be with the Father. He has sent us his Spirit to empower us for continuing the work of the Kingdom, as we learn from the events of Pentecost. But he has also given us the sure hope that all shall be most well, as TS Eliot would say,^[[1]] all shall be well.

On a smaller than cosmic scale that is the message for us, too, as the community of faith that we know as St. John’s. The message as we trust our nominators and the rest of the incumbency committee to seek a new priest to continue the ministry that Ken [Hewlett] has shared amongst us is quite simply that the work of the Kingdom is continuing and will continue to continue, both during the interregnum and following the new appointment, whenever that shall be. God is in control.

It should of course also be remembered that it is you who are the Church in East Bentleigh. Those of us who are called into your midst to serve you are in the end only here to make possible your ongoing life of worship, of evangelism, of care for one another and of the community. It is for that that we are called into your midst, that and to stand as a sign of your being a part of the wider Church. That is why eventually we must move on.

As you hold that understanding, that it is you who are the community of faith, that it is  you who are the Church, then I believe that it will become increasingly apparent to all of us that God indeed is in control, that all things do indeed work together for the good, and that “the terrors of the seas” will be kept wrapped in swaddling clouds.

 

---

[1] Citing Julian of Norwich, but I either didn’t know or didn’t mention that in 1988.

totally incomprehensible faith

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St Peter’s, Queenstown
THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER
(May 3^rd) 2025
 

Readings

Revelation 5: 11-14

Psalm 30

John 21: 1-19

 

 

You may or may not recall, but during the reading of the passion, On both Good Friday and the Sunday before Easter, there is that moment when Peter denies Jesus for the third time, and the cock crows. Every year as I read that passage this is a moment at which I feel a shiver down my spine. This is probably because I know my own capacity to deny my faith under duress, and history demonstrates that however strong a believer a person is sometimes the sheer psychological trauma of persecution and threats defeats their expectations of faith.

Would I be brave enough when Hitler's brown shirts came marching to my house in the middle of the night, or indeed when Mr. Trump’s goons arrived on the flimsiest of evidence and against the law of the land to drag American residents and refugees off to a Peruvian prison, would I be brave enough to stand up for them? And indeed in the United States where Christianity is being defined as legitimate only when it places trump and his agenda, and for that matter the American flag into a place of higher priority then the cross of Jesus Christ, would I be strong enough to stand up against the tyranny. If I were told that only believers in Trump's alleged form of Christianity were allowed to worship and all others were traitors and subverters, would I be brave enough to hold fast?

The question is more relevant today in the Europeanized world than it has been at any time since the mid 1940s. Never did I expect that I would be preaching at a time when belief in the compassionate and justice seeking Christ put fellow believers in a western nation at risk of their freedom. So the shiver that runs down my spine when I encounter Peter’s denial of Jesus is deeply visceral. We have probably all seen the meme that reads this is so and so, be like so and so. We have in the scriptures the potential meme this is Peter, do not be like Peter.

And I say all this because the scene today is a powerful moment of reconciliation between the disciples, all the males of whom fled from Jesus in his most poignant time of need, reconciliation between them and there is and but absolutely the same Jesus.

Aha, you might say, but was he the same, for no one recognised him? And yet the gospel writers, Matthew, Luke and John are determined to make it clear that in all matters of what we might call mind and spirit, this is one and the same person. Furthermore they are adamant that we are dealing not with some immortal soul but the Risen One, as able as you and I to chomp on a piece of fish. It is a strange detail, but not one to be ignored.

Leaving aside however Jesus with a hungry belly – after all death and resurrection are an exhausting business – the remarkable dimension in this moment is the profound reconciliation between Jesus and his betrayers. We generally refer to Judas as the betrayer, but the desertion committed by all 2018 02 24 1038athe men (And seemingly not the powerless women) was equally betrayal. These betrayers and deserters are here reconciled to their victim. 

For a moment I imagined myself in the shoes of the disciples, mystified by the resurrection appearance, and deeply worried as to how this their friend would treat them after their desertion. And at the risk of becoming a bit mystical and speculative I begin to get a glimpse of what we call heaven. I don't believe we won't see into this mystery that lies beyond our graves nonchalantly demanding our place at the table. But I do believe, with Paul, that's beyond all understanding, beyond all rationality this is the moment that we are reconciled not only with our God in Christ, but with all who we have let down, even betrayed. Reconciled not with an airy wave of the hand, box with those deep piercing eyes and a gesture of welcome so well portrayed in the Narnia stories as Aslan greets the resurrected children.

And beyond that mystical imagining I can say little. The gospel writers found that it was beyond their capacity to explain the encounters with the risen Lord. It is equally beyond our capacity to understand what on earth this resurrection business is, or better still what in heaven’s name this resurrection business is. Yet I stand solidly with St Paul, for without this incomprehensible mystery we are simply wasting time, and we all might find better things to do on a Sunday morning. But because of this incomprehensible mystery we can stumble through the deaths of our loved ones and indeed our own dying, and we can reach out our hands to receive these strange elements of bread and wine, as Jesus taught us, and then go out into the world strengthened and reawakened in our totally incomprehensible faith.

live ... truth

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

SUNDAY AFTER THE ASCENSION (May 15^th) 1988

John 17: 6-19

 

Some years ago when I was in the equivalent of year 10 at a boarding school in New Zealand, I was returning to my boarding house from a sports meeting in the city, and on the way home I stopped, as I often did in those days, with a friend for a quick cigarette in the cemetery. Unknown to either of us we were spotted by one of the house prefects who was also returning from the city, and who, when we arrived back at the house separately some minutes later summoned us to the prefects’ study. We were called up to the study separately, and neither knew why, or whether the other had also been summoned. There, independently of one another, we were each asked the dreaded question, “Have you been smoking?” 

Now I was never a brave fifteen-year-old, and was usually very quick to find some alternative to the truth if I sensed that the truth was likely to bring me trouble, that a white lie or six would help preserve me from trouble. On this occasion, however, I quickly realised I had an insurmountable problem or two. In the first place I had not had enough time to shower and change out of the clothes which still had the smell of cigarette smoke clinging to them, nor disguise the smell of smoke on my breath. And in the second place I didn’t know whether my friend had also been interrogated, and if he had, whether he had dobbed me in. I confessed to my crime, knowing that I would be caned. My friend, I later learned, made a desperate attempt to lie his way out of the predicament.

Now there could be three possible endings to this story. I could have been rewarded for my honesty and let off the punishment for my heinous crime. Or I could have been punished for my sins, while my friend’s lies saved his skin from punishment. Or the prefects could have decided we were both guilty and each equally deserving of punishment. I’ll tell you one day what happened.

But I will say that the point that was really at issue that afternoon was not one of a couple of clandestine cigarettes, but rather one of truth, of honesty. Billy Joel sings of honesty as being “such a lonely word.”  It was that day.

And “what is truth?” said Pilate.

Running through all the writings in the New Testament that bear John’s name is a sort of sub-theme of truth. John mentions the word “truth” far more than any other New Testament writer, and only the Psalms contain more reference to the word than John’s account of the gospel. This theme of truth is introduced at the very opening of the gospel account:

the word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

Constantly John is to return to this theme. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and those who abide in Jesus abide in truth.

Truth in John’s thought is much more than mere honesty. But clearly, where there is no honesty, there cannot be even the beginnings of truth. An encounter with Jesus – an encounter that I believe we join in together each time we share in the Eucharist – an encounter with Jesus is an encounter with truth, and with all that truth demands.

So what is truth? That of course is Pilate’s question, but that is no reason for us to shun it. What is truth?

The life and death of Jesus points us in an unmistakable way to part of the answer. Jesus died because he spoke the word of truth in the midst of society’s innumerable means of avoiding truth. He spoke the word of truth that love, not law, is what God demands of all his people. He spoke the word of truth that justice must be a central concern of all people who claim to be people of God. He spoke the word of truth that it is our inner thoughts and deeds that are the concern of God, not our outer shows of  religious excellence. Jesus points us to the truth, and the way of the cross is and always will be the way of truth.

Jesus also reminds us that God is the parent in heaven who discerns motives, not actions. It was not the wealthy, sanctimonious giver at the temple who won the admiration of Jesus, but the poor widow who gave to God not a mere tithe but all of her possessions.

              Sanctify them in the truth; thy word is truth.

Jesus in his hour of agony prays for us, that we might live and be “holy” in the truth. How can we do that?

There are no hard and fast rules. There is only the expectation that we are to live our lives as ambassadors or icons of Christ, that those around us will evaluate Christ and therefore God by what they see, of us, of our actions. So we must evaluate our lives and ensure they are lived with integrity. 

Do we live by any double standards? If so then we must set right such a double standard and seek to live a life of truth. Do we gossip, speaking well of our neighbour behind his or her back without first seeking to bring our grievances and innuendos to the person concerned for clarification and reconciliation? If so then we must curb our ready tongues, seek the forgiveness of God and any who we have slandered, and live instead in truth. Do we say things about people behind their backs that we could not say to their face? Do we build up resentments against one another without airing them directly? If so, then we must once again seek God’s forgiveness and the Spirit’s assistance to help us live together in truth.

To deviate from truth is sin. That is precisely the meaning of the word “sin.” It is a missing of the mark, a deviation from a true aim. If we are to join in the New Testament notion that Christians will be recognisable to the rest of the world by the quality of their love for one another and for their neighbour then we must emphasise that the great gifts God makes available to us are open to us only when we live a life befitting of Christ. The Christ who died precisely because he confronted the world with naked truth.

Jesus describes himself in the Fourth Gospel as “the way, the truth, and the life.” It is only and can only be when we embrace the vocation to live our entire life in honesty and truth that we can receive the abundant benefits of the life Jesus seeks to liberate all people to enjoy.

Christ is risen?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

EASTER 2 (April 17^th) 1988

 

 
They offered him a piece of grilled fish, which he took and  ate before their eyes

 

 

This morning, and throughout the season of Easter, we made the joyful affirmation, “Christ is risen,” and responded as one voice, “He is risen indeed.”  Why? What do we mean when we make this claim? Or do we just say it because it’s a nice thing to say and it is in the book anyway?

Constantly we find the accounts of Jesus’ post-Easter appearances in the New Testament emphasising peculiar little details about the nature of Jesus’ resurrection body. If we analyse all of these little comments made by the New Testament authors a clear consensus begins to emerge. Jesus was different in appearance to what he had been up to and including the crucifixion, but he was nevertheless quite definitely human. He was able to be touched, to be held, and, in our passage today, even to eat.

Why do the writers of these accounts bother to make these little details known? It was certainly not in order to win more people over to the teachings of the new found Christian faith, for any good Greek was likely to scoff at any suggestion that God should want to raise more than merely the spirit of his chosen servant, would want Jesus to appear to his followers as any more than a ghost.

Quite clearly, then, the New Testament authors included these hard to swallow details about the body and bodiliness of the risen Christ because they saw them as central to the Easter message, central to the Christian faith.

The question I want to ask is, “do we?”

I suspect that were a survey to be done on Christian belief, and the questions were asked, “do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”, many if not most Christian believers would reply, “Yes.” Certainly at most funerals I attend such a belief is often expressed by mourners, and the ubiquitous Masonic rituals affirm belief in the immortality of the soul rather than the distinctively Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.

Is there a difference, or am I simply splitting hairs? I believe there is a difference, and that it is of great importance for our living out of Christian faith. For at the basis of this question is the underlying question, “did Jesus rise?” and its corollary, “Is there a distinctively Christian hope in the face of death?”

When I attend or take a funeral I say this prayer:

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust:

in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

who died, and was buried, and rose again for us,

and who shall change our mortal body

that it may be like his glorious body …

 

In saying that prayer I am expressing the distinctively Christian belief that death is a mere interim, and that the person who we have lost is one with whom we shall be reunited, body and soul, at the end of what we know as time. I am not merely looking forward to a time when my spirit and that person’s spirit shall be reunited, but to a future bodily resurrection.

The belief in the immortality of the soul is an ancient Greek belief that pre-dated Christianity by some centuries. It is not the belief and the Good News for which Jesus lived and died. And, furthermore, I believe that if we are to be consistent and true to the essentials of our faith we cannot hold to a belief in the immortality of the soul. It stands in contradiction to Christian teaching, and is mutually exclusive with Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead.

I do not want to make the claim that I am right and those who hold to belief in the immortality of the soul are wrong. I can make no such claim. I do want to say, though, that they are separate beliefs, and that if we say “Amen” to the Christian creeds by which we affirm belief in “the resurrection of the dead,” or “the resurrection of the body,” then we cannot be a part of any doctrine that affirms no more than belief in an immortal soul.

When Paul and other early Christians proclaimed to the non-Jewish world that Jesus rose bodily from the grave, and that because he had in that way conquered death so his people likewise would be freed to rise bodily from the grave – at the end of time – his hearers would have laughed. No god-fearing Greek could ever accept such a doctrine, because Greeks believed that all matter is essentially evil, and that the body is no more than a prison in which the immortal soul is temporarily housed.

But Paul was saying something radically different. He was saying that God would recreate the bodies of his people, the bodies in which we live and die, and that we shall be bodily raised from death, body and soul together (if we can separate the two), and never again taste separation and death.

Handel grasps the all of this doctrine in The Messiah when he sets Paul’s words to music.

The trumpet shall sound and we shall be changed,
the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised ...

incorruptible.

 

This means that whenever I officiated a funeral I believe – though I cannot altogether explain the mystery – but I believe that the person who has died will at the end of time be raised bodily and dwell in that as yet unattainable form in the nearer, intimate presence of God and God’s people.

Underlying these claims is an even more basic belief central to Christian and Jewish belief alike: God created and saw that it was good. If we hold to a belief that maintains less than the resurrection of the body, then we are denying the goodness of the creation that God has designed and brought into being.

Says one major theologian,

Body and soul are both originally good insofar as they are created by God; they are both bad insofar as the deadly power of the flesh has hold of them. Both can and must be set free by the quickening power of the Holy Spirit.[1]

 

He goes on to say,

Deliverance consists not in a release of soul from body but in a release of both from flesh.

Cullmann here uses the word “flesh” in the way that Paul does, not to mean “body,” but to mean “fallenness” or “sinfulness.” We shall be raised incorruptible.

The reason I stress this is twofold. In the first place it is important that we know and understand the teachings of our faith. If Christianity has not a distinctive set of beliefs then we may as well hand over to the civil celebrants for our weddings and funerals, or join perhaps the Hare Krisna sect, or the Mormons. But if we do believe something distinctive then we ought to know what it is.

But secondly I maintain we should know as Christians how to face the question of death. How should I as a Christian face my death? We know in the light of Good Friday that we cannot sidestep the issue, so how should we grapple with it? And how should I treat the world and the body in which I live, especially in the light of the belief that Jesus saw fit to dwell likewise in this world and in a human body?

The answer is that I should face death with enormous hope. The hope that I and indeed all who God loves shall indeed be raised anew, shall be re clothed in a glorious body as Jesus was, and shall dwell together with God in incorruptible bodies and unpollutable love. And I believe too that I should love and enjoy all that I experience of this creation, this body and this world in which I live, for this as a foretaste of the inexpressibly beautiful re-creation that lies ahead.

Again, I do not want to claim that this doctrine, this belief in the resurrection of the body, (and the coming re-creation of creation, for Christ is only the first fruits of all that is to come), is better than any other, non-Christian doctrine, or that it offers any greater hope to the dying or to the bereaved. But I do want to emphasize that it offers a distinctly Christian belief.

The fact that men [and women] continue to die no longer has the same significance after the resurrection of Christ. The fact of death is robbed of its former significance. Dying is no longer an expression of the absolute Lordship of Death, but only one of Death’s last contentions for Lordship. Death cannot put an end to the great fact that there is one risen Body.[2]

 

Christ, of course, the first fruit of all creation. Christ is risen! When we affirm that, as we have all done here this morning, we affirm also our belief that he has made possible the resurrection of the body for all who are in him. Christ is risen, and we have the witness of his first amazed followers that he ate with them, walked with them, that they touched him and conversed with him. We do not have that opportunity, though we are, I believe, able in a very real sense to do precisely that in the Eucharist in which we are about to share. Christ is risen, and in that faith we are able to go on to face life and death in the shore hope that no thing cannot separate us from the love of God or of those we love in God.

Christ is risen!

---

[1] Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? London: Epworth, 1958, 35.

[2] Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?, 40-41.

that empty tomb

 SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

EASTER DAY (April 3^rd) 1988

 

 

 

It happened just a week later. Fletcher was demonstrating the elements of high speed flying to a class of new students. He had just pulled out of a dive from seven thousand feet … When a young bird on its first flight glided directly into his path, calling for its mother. With a tenth of a second to avoid the youngster, Fletcher Lynd Seagull snapped hard to the left, at something over two hundred miles per hour, into a cliff of solid granite.

It was, for him, as though the rock were a giant hard door into another world. A burst of fear and shock and black as he hit, and then he was adrift in a strange, strange sky, forgetting, remembering, forgetting …

Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

(Pan: London: 1970. 85-86)

 

There can be no new life without death. It is that tension that we must hold in our faith each year, and particularly as each Easter comes around. And, in an attempt to maintain that truth-tension some of you have, over the past forty days of Lent, journeyed with Jesus towards the cross. If you have been following Richard Holloway’s book^[[1]] you will have paused at the Stations of the Cross, dwelling at each station on the cost to Jesus of our salvation. If you have observed during Lent some form of abstinence, it will have served to remind you that there can be no salvation without cost. But whatever our discipline has been, we must be reminded again and again of the cost to our Lord of the glorious festival that we celebrate today.

Jesus turned and set his face resolutely towards Jerusalem. He knew something of what lay ahead for him there. He spoke to his followers of the pain he was soon to face, and of the death that awaited him. His disciples were puzzled for here was the one who was to be their king speaking to them of suffering and death. Judas was so confused by this seeming contradiction that he eventually realized that the only way he could continue the revolutionary energy Jesus had originally generated would be to betray him. This talk of suffering and death seemed to Judas to be contradictory to the cause of liberation and freedom. I suspect there is something of Judas in each of us.  Judas simply wished to reap the benefits that he saw the Messiah Jesus to be offering, without recognising the cost.

Peter was no different. When Jesus first foretold the suffering that lay ahead of him, Peter rebukes him. Yet “Get behind me, Satan” (Mark. 8:33) was the harsh response of Jesus.

Why? So often I have struggled with that passage. Why is Jesus so harsh, so rude, to one of his closest followers? Yet the answer is staringly obvious: there can be no joy without sorrow, there can be no hope without despair, no resurrection without the crucifixion. We long for easy answers to the questions of life, and especially to the question of death. But Christianity offers no easy, cheap answer. Jesus, even before his arrest in the Garden, knew clearly that there could be no easy answer. So he journeys resolutely on towards his death, knowing that only in death can life be made meaningful, that only in suffering can new life be offered.

How we would love to sidestepped that scandal of death. We live in a society that pleads to remain forever young. Yet two and a half centuries ago the biting satirist Jonathan Swift exposed that lame hope for the con that it is. In the acerbic satire Gulliver's Travels the hero, Gulliver, encounters a race amongst whom dwell a mutant form of human being, whose mutation expresses itself with the curse of immortality. The curse of immortality? Gulliver, too, poses that question, only to discover that such immortality is a curse because it is death that the mutant Struldbuggs sidestep, not the ravages of ageing. Says Gulliver, with masterful understatement,

the reader will easily believe … my keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated.

 

Life and death are, and must be, inseparable.

Sadly, so many religious enthusiasts claimed to provide an easy answer to the seemingly tragic fact of death. So many, like Judas, like Peter, want to acquire the blessings of Easter, the resurrection, without first experiencing the horrors of Good Friday. We as Christians so often open ourselves to the criticisms of the great atheists that we cling to our piety, our faith, only in order to avoid the bleak fact that we are mortal, that each of us shall die. For even Fletcher Lynd Seagull, in my opening quotation, had to pass through the granite wall of death in order to pass on to new life.

And that is perhaps the tragedy of the chocolate Easter egg and the Easter Bunny. We have allowed these two quite profound symbols of the mystery of the resurrection to be raped by commerce, to be turned into a tragic parody, to be turned into trivia. The egg should be a powerful symbol of new life, a reminder of the potential of humanity in Christ to burst out of the shackles of the grave into resurrection life. And even the rabbit: rabbits’ habits unknown only too well. The rabbit therefore can stand as a symbol of the regeneration that the Easter hope provides us. Yet we have allowed these symbols to become symbols of life without first taking to heart the significance of the cross on the hot cross buns we ate on Friday. There can be no regeneration, there can be no bursting out of the grave, without first undergoing the scandal of death. If we are not to lose altogether the significance of our commercialized symbols of Easter then we must baptize them, proclaimed them as significant only in the whole context of the Christian gospel. For the hope of the Resurrection there is the terrible cost of death.

The Resurrection is never an evasion of death, it is consequent upon death, it only comes when we have plumbed the depths.

(Richard Holloway, The Way of the Cross, 118).

 

The Easter egg can have no meaning unless its shell is destroyed. There is no new life unless the beauty of the egg is shattered. Or, to use another traditional Christian symbol, there can be no bright morning star until we have passed through the darkness of the night.

In the end there can be no proof of the Christian truth-claim that Jesus is risen. We were not there to stand alongside the women at the unexpectedly empty tomb and to hear the declaration, “He is not there, he is risen.” Tennyson, the great English poet, echoes these words in his mammoth work “In Memoriam,” in which he mourns the death of his close friend Arthur Halem.

He is not here; but far away

      The noise of life begins again,

      And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

On the bold street breaks the bleak day.

                                                 “In Memoriam”, vii.

But the resurrection message of Easter is more even than the knowledge that our lives go on despite the loss of those we love, or that the causes for which Jesus lived and died can be continued in successive communities. Those, too, are truths, but hardly the gospel.

For there is good news. It can never and must never be proved, but for me I find in Easter the great hope that enables me to attend and to officiate at funerals, to minister to the bereaved and to the dying, and to face my own inevitable death with greater confidence than would otherwise be possible. For in the message of Easter I hear the good news that we have a God who loves us, and who has created for us an existence far greater than that we presently experience. Who, in the Resurrection of his Son, opens for us a way to experience that internal awareness of his love beyond the limitations of our future grave. In Easter there is no way out of death, but the hope for a beyond.

I am ascending to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God.

                                                                                                   (John 20:17)

 

In the light then of this glorious morning I can face life. I can face suffering, I can face tragedy, I can face death. For, while Jesus does not remove from us the tragedy of death, he transforms that tragedy into a symbol of hope. Christian faith must never side steps suffering and death, but reveals God in the very heart of tragedy and leads us on into inexpressible ecstasy.

And so this Easter let us join with Paul in that glorious hymn,

O death, where is your victory,

      O death where is your sting?

Thanks be to God who gives us the victory,

      through our Lord Jesus.

 

 

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[1] Richard Holloway, The Way of the Cross.