good fruit, bad fruit

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St Peter’s, Queenstown

EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

(March 2nd) 2025

 

 Readings

Isaiah 55: 10-13

Psalm 92: 1-4, 12-15

Luke 6: 43-45

 

 One of the first actions of those who would seek to control a populace is to eradicate the arts and humanities from the curriculum of schools and universities. 

Cartoonists are  often amongst the first to be silenced one way or another. The staff of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo became one shocking modern example when they were bombed on three occasions, most tragically in 2015. The suppression of artistic comment is not copyright to anyone oppressive or would be oppressive regime, though in that case the atrocities were perpetrated by Muslim extremists. I should perhaps add that I have never been a fan of the kind of satirical aggression that Charlie Hebdo represented, but execution is never a satisfactory solution to political, racial or religious differences. 

Less recently, and therefore less well known, was the execution of English cartoonist Stephen College – admittedly in the 17th century. He was fighting for the right of a Roman Catholic to succeed to the throne in England, and was hung drawn and quartered by Protestant militia. But look, too, to the patterns of dictatorships throughout history: German, Spanish, Ugandan … the list is endless.

Let me emphasise that my focus here is on the Jesus sayings around good trees and bad fruit, bad trees and good fruit. 

It is sometimes necessary to look at those who would be leaders of society and to make judgements. We are called to do so, based on their behaviour and attitudes. 

I had for example the misfortune yesterday to watch footage of the President and Vice President of the United States using the worst forms of bully tactics in attempts to cow the spirit of the president of Ukraine.

It was ugly, and without any judgement of what sort of a person Zelenskyy is, for I have no way of knowing, Trump and Vance betrayed deep inhumanity. It has of course long been a pattern of Trump’s behaviour, though I had never heard of the man prior to his descent into an ostentatious foyer on an ostentatious escalator back in 2015. I remember only too well his stalking overbearance as he paced the stage attempting to cow Hilary Clinton. 

Because she is a woman, and his attitudes to women are well-known. Because she stood in his way. 

Zelenskyy is not a woman, but he stands in the way of Trumpian schemes, personal or national, to gain mineral wealth and power. Bullying body language is a sad response, though it was probably wasted on the Ukrainian comic and satirist.  

For those of you who believe that politics should never enter the metaphorical pulpit, I largely agree. By and large I believe those who preach should not tell their listeners how to vote. And quite clearly I can’t do that because few who will hear me today if any have the right to vote in the USA, and if any happened to be USA citizens it is some considerable time before you get the chance to vote again.

Jesus takes us deeply into territory in which we assess the virtue of a person at least in part through their external demeanour and behaviour. There are of course some exceptions; a person suffering from virulent forms of mental illness can hardly be blamed for their behaviour. Tourette’s Syndrome is perhaps the most obvious example of this.

When I worked in inner city Melbourne I from time to time preached in a small chapel catering specifically to the needs of those who are living on or around the streets, and who often lived with the outcomes of mental illness. One in particular remains in my mind. He would, in a loud voice, pronounce a word that rhymes with duck to demonstrate his agreement or otherwise with statements I was making.

The word was of course unfamiliar to me, but one or two people indicated that some could find it faintly offensive. Can it be such when it is an illness, not an attitude of heart or spirit that is speaking? We adapted to the gentleman’s expostulations.

But in world politics today we are not in any sense dealing with mental illness from the leaders of the free world. In the lead up to elections I am often met with variations on a theme of “it’s the economy, stupid!” This phrase or something like it tends to be spoken when I am exploring suggestions that compassion and a bias to the most vulnerable and broken of God’s earth are the key navigational beacon as we ascertain who it is to whom our votes should go.

I am no economist, so my response is generally to smile vacuously, and to believe something quite different.

So we come at last to good trees and bad fruit and bad trees and good fruit.

We as a people of God are called, as the Bible puts it, to test the spirits. Politicians of course are becoming increasingly rancorous, perhaps because that is increasingly the form of entertainment we expect from them. That is a judgement on us.

I thank God for church leaders such as Bishop Budde, Bishop of Washington, who speak out of a deeply biblical sense of the priorities of justice and compassion. As I watched the performance of the president and vice president of the USA badgering the president of Ukraine I could not but think of the firm but compassionate words delivered by the Mariann Budde in her cathedral at the inauguration of the 47th Presidency.

“The good person” says Jesus “out of the good treasure of the heart produces good and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil.”

I do not think God is right wing or left wing. God does not always agree with me and in any case I’ve seen inspirational leadership and the betterment of society come from both wings of politics at different times. I do not believe that we can change politics in a far-off country. I do think we are challenged to speak out where we see injustice and to act out where we see a lack of compassion, wherever we are

Sometimes to do that is to be called woke or politically correct.

I’m not sure of the meaning of those words. I do know that Jesus hangs out with those who are broken and on the fringes of society. He sternly addresses those who are in positions of privilege and power when they abuse or oppress the vulnerable.

I began with cartoonists but I used the word as what scholars call metonym. I have mentioned Washington already. I referred to it as a geographical location, or a diocese in that particular case.

Such a word becomes “metonym” when we use it to represent all that is associated with the word and the place or activity the word describes.

“Washington” can also mean the US government. “Canberra” can mean the Australian government. “Cartoonist” can mean all who use the arts to express deep social truths, faith-based or otherwise.

“Cartoonists” in this sense are often amongst the first to find themselves up against the wall when a government becomes authoritarian, dictatorial, shuffling its way towards evil. Muslim extremists took lives at Charlie Hebdo because they objected to the rights to freedom of speech. Dictators kill those who threaten them. Ask Vladimir Putin.

Dictatorial leaders do their best to silence historians, novelists, cartoonists, even in the specific sense of those words. Some of you may remember the persecution of punk rock band Pussy Riot in Mr. Putin’s Russia or that of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in the United States. Rock bands and folk singers can easily find themselves up against the wall, metaphorically or literally.

So too can church leaders, and one thinks immediately of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King jr., Desmond Tutu. One fears for the future, and God forbid it may be this dark, of Bishop Mariann Budde.

God forbid, indeed, and let us be thankful that we live in a tiny and unimportant nation. But that should never lead us to complacency. We must speak out where we see indecency, close by or far away. We must speak out where we see bad fruit revealing the dark secret that the tree that bears it is rotten to the core. Sometimes we will disagree with one another, and we must do so in love, but Jesus throughout especially Luke’s account of the gospel, challenges us, dares us to speak out for justice and compassion.

 

contrasts

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St Peter’s, Queenstown

SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

(February 23^rd) 2025

 

 Readings

1 Corinthians 15: 50b-53

Psalm 37: 1-8, 39-40

Luke 6: 27-31

 

 

 

I’ve taken snatches of two of the set readings today, because both challenge us to live in a countercultural world.

In a post enlightenment world we look very scornfully at claims that cannot be proved by scientific method. A doctrine of the resurrection of the body, not just some wafty continuation of the spirit, immortality of the soul, continuation of matter, or nitrogen cycle, but Paul’s central thesis of the resurrection of the body, is vastly unpopular. Prove it.

Indeed, resurrection is scientific nonsense. Having an invisible friend who will hear and answer prayers is risible, at least according to scientific method and its hold on society.

And we make it all the more so, unnecessarily, when we as Christians indulge in ridiculousness. I had the pleasure this past week of interviewing Bishop Kelvin for the book I'm writing; together we agreed in lamenting the great excesses of the renewal movement that reached its peak in the 1970s. Both of us were touched by Renewal; some of you will have been so too. I’ve been around God stuff enough to agree with Archbishop John Sentamu, that the more we pray the more coincidences happen. But sometimes we confuse prayer, that process of surrendering to God, with Hollywood, with entertainment.

For years I have remembered with horror the stories of well-known and perhaps well-meaning renewal evangelist John Wimber strutting the stage beneath the spotlights, yelling “more power, Lord” as he tried to encourage little less than the dead to walk, as he tried to encourage tumours to exit bodies, depression and mental illness to flee, and stumbling marriages miraculously to heal without the mahi, the hard work that reconciliation of hurting partners requires.

There have been moments in my life and others’ when unexpected miracles have appeared. I would be far from willing to limit the possibilities of God to the scientifically provable or expected. My problem with the showmanship of Wimber and others like him was the showmanship, the reduction of God to a clown to be called from the heavens on demand, rather than the patient waiting on unexpected possibilities that God may or may not will into our fragile lives.

To Paul, our bodies and our lives are corruptible. We decay. Our limbs grow old, our cells mutate, our psyches flounder, our marriages die. Yet in the midst of human vulnerability Paul sees hope that reaches even beyond all that befalls us.

When we turn to Jesus and his discomforting sayings that we find an equal if not greater countercultural gap. Jesus challenges us to turn expectations upside down – again and again.  

Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. These are terribly challenging and both fiscally and emotionally costly.

I must check my responses. Am I speaking out where I see injustice, for that would be one way to offer my other cheek? Am I praying for those who I genuinely believe are perpetrating evil from the corridors of power of the most powerful nation on earth at this time? For that would be another way of offering my shirt. Am I helping those at the bottom of society’s heap, or protecting my own interests or the interests of bodies I belong to?

What can I do within the limitations of my own situation? How I can exercise love, justice, compassion, surrender my shirt as well as my coat to the very best of my ability and the circumstances in which I find myself?

To do this we need the help of God. We need help in order to swim against a global tide of selfishness stemming from those who have the most, whose gospel is balanced books, profit margins, power. When we have given the shirt from our backs, even the building from our ledgers, then we can ask God to do the rest. Crying for more power, Lord, will work only when we give up our own attitudes of self-protection and reliance.

 

Bloomin' Beatitudes

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St Peter’s, Queenstown

SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

(February 16^th) 2025

 

 

Readings

 

Jeremiah 17: 5-10

Psalm 1

Luke 6: 20-26

 

 

As I’ve no doubt said before, I wish that instead of cries from the Christian Right, especially Christian Nationalists, for the Ten Commandments to be emblazoned on every court and school noticeboard, that the Beatitudes were emblazoned there instead. Emblazoned, recited, sung, whatever.

They represent an upside-down world, that world that the mother of Jesus prophesized from the beginning of her miraculous encounter with God. In her future-scaping words: “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the meek and lowly.” Or in the words of her equally stroppy son, “How blessed are you who are poor: the Kingdom of God is yours.”

Commandments and Beatitudes alike are honoured infinitely more in the breach than the observance. So are most of the demands of Jesus, and of the Torah that he embodies. 

That is why we have, or at least enact, a time of spiritual cleansing in every eucharistic liturgy. A cleansing of souls, ears, hearts. Only then can we begin to encounter the impossible – Christ in us, God for us, the Triune Presence in bread and wine and fellowship. 

Always ever only by the initiation of God. The energy of God. The love of God.

While both Matthew and Luke have different emphases as they tell of these poignant teachings of Jesus, neither has him say “how blessed are you when people persecute you for being insensitive gets, insufferably self-righteous, puritanical, or holier than thou.” It is when we speak out of the embodiment of Jesus’ upside down world, how blessed are the “countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse” of Dylan’s famous “Chimes of Freedom,” only when we believe that and act on that, that we are as the Beatitudes put it, “Blessed.”

Which does not mean we go from there to a hunky-dory-cruisy life. The lives of the saints who we are called to emulate make that abundantly clear. The perspective of God is somewhat different to ours.

“Blessed,” then, does not mean a bed of roses. But that is another sermon.

So, do I live up to, embody the call to encapsulate these blessings? No. If any of you do, let me know, and let me know how you do it. 

But having cleaned out soul-ears, every Sunday, Sunday by Sunday, day by day, whatever, our task is to touch one life, take one action, even one random act of kindness, one embodiment of these demands of Jesus. More than that is bonus. 

And to that end, again in our liturgy so carefully crafted over the centuries, we offer ourselves for strengthening and up-lifting by the mysterious Spirit. That Spirit who indwells us at our invitation again and again. That Spirit who makes Jesus and his resurrection, his justice, his judgement (of us) present in us. That invasion of us by all that Jesus is. 

That he will do, by our invitation again and again and again, until that moment when we see no longer through a darkened glass, but in the fullness of the light of Christ.

 The Lord be with you.

Pivotal pokes: where the light gets in: YOU

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

Thematic - not seasonal. Taken May 2018

and ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 5 (February 9^th), 2025

 

READINGS

Isaiah 6: 1-13

Luke 5: 1-11

 

(nb. this has ended up on my parallel blog, too ... enjoy twice?)

So many themes run through these readings – even as we operate under a reduced number of them! – and it’s kind of fitting as I climb back into the saddle after unexpected down time to lay a few themes down. Briefly!

The greatest theme here is that of the gentle, persuasive love of and patience of God. In the two passages we have, the calling of Isaiah and the calling of Simon Peter and the gang, the word of God is invitation, not enforcement. It is not the language of a big stick, but of compassion. “Let me show you a more excellent way” as the Apostle Paul puts it in Corinthians.

In a hymn we’re not having today– (you wouldn’t expect me to be that organized despite a new year!) – we find a beautiful expression of God’s invitation:

“O Love that will not let me go,

I rest my weary soul in thee.

I give thee back the life I owe,

that in thine ocean depths its flow

may richer, fuller be”

Too often we portray our Christ as waver of sticks and builder of barricades. “Thou shalt not.” Be who you are not before you enter here. While I’m not a believer in stickers on churches that engage in forms of virtue signalling, I believe our task is to be, as the Isaiahs and Peters were called to be at cost – walking advertisements of God’s Manaakitanga.

God’s unending, timeless welcome: come. Come to me all you who are weary.

Perhaps in the liberal end of the church to which I subscribe – as you’ll see in what I’ve written on the Isaiah passage (***see below***), and discussed online in the Gospel passage – I err too far to the obviously sociologically disadvantaged?

Years ago, David Sheppard, Bishop of Liverpool (and useful batter for England) described it as a “bias to the poor.” Or as Bishop Budde put it more recently, reminding the world that poverty otherness are vulbnerable places to be;  “… for some, the loss of their hopes and dreams will be far more than political defeat, but instead a loss of equality and dignity and their livelihoods.”

But Mr Trump and Mr Musk are welcome here too.  I live in the top tiny per centage of the world’s wealth and power. I am judged too. I am a Cisgendered Caucasian male. I am judged too. That’s why (though this is counter Mr Trump) we, in the old language, “acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed by thought, word, and deed.”

We say sorry. We aren’t who we should be. We say, again with Paul, “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do,” and, “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”

We are called to do better, and it is a lifetime of learning and stumbling and learning. I’m pretty boring but there’s plenty of scorch marks and stumbling in my story. I do not share Mr Trump’s demonic belief in self-perfection. I have much to say sorry for. Not least my wealth, my status in the 3%, a rich Christian in an age of hunger,” as Ronald Sider put it years ago.

Yet for all my failings, perhaps our failings, we are called to be a tithe, a 10%, a remnant in the world who dare to believe in the hope and the love and the light of God, seen in Christ. Who dare to believe that neither my sin nor the sin of the world we live in is the final word on existence, even in an age of catastrophic global warming and the collapse of the world’s biggest empire.

We are called to be a sign, however flawed. And there will be some who pass through our world and even through our own small lives, who we never forget as signs of love and hope and faith. And that will always involve compassion and active work towards justice towards those most disadvantaged.

No matter what the demonic distortion of Christianity that is Christian nationalism might say, acts and programmes of compassion such as Black Lives Matter, such as Bias to the Poor, such as compassion and justice for the wretched of the earth, are not an optional extra for those of us who are called to be bearers of Christ.

We are in one of history’s apocalyptic eras. There have been many before and there may be many again. But these are the times when the hard work of faith becomes super-critical. We are called again and again to open our hearts to the light that we encounter in following and in worshipping the Jesus who is revealed to us in scripture, tradition, liturgy, and reason.

May God help us to be bearers of light.

 

 

 

ON ISAIAH's CALLING:

Isaiah 6: 1-12 

This famous passage is what scholars call a calling—a phrase that you may have encountered if you have been a part of a “local shared ministry” or similar faith community. Unusually the Isaiah narrative puts it some way into the prophet’s story, but that can remind us that every journey differs. It’s representative of your encounter with God and mine: we are here, and, whatever the Richter Scale of our faith, this is where God has called us, encountered us this day.

But, annoyingly, having been poked by God, we don’t get to sit down and sip a cold beer and expect all to be hunky-dory. This is where the going gets tough … (and yeah, you may know the rest of the ad? But if we are the tough who get going, it is the Spirit within us who provides the tough: be step forward in Christ).

To what? I say it again: not all beer and skittles. In this passage Isaiah makes it clear it’s not going to be popular path. Late in Isaiah the prophet makes clear, whether we like it or not, that ours is not a path of popularity. Actually he makes it clear that it a pretty darned woke path, because, sorry to those who don’t like it, but God is rather woke:

Is not this the fast that I choose:
    to loose the bonds of injustice,
    to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
    and to break every yoke?

Justice for the hurting and vulnerable is a theme we will hear much of in coming weeks. And it has nothing and everything to do with politics (US or NZ) and it has nothing and everything to do with following Jesus. We are called to be the 10% remnant who proclaim it and live it.