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.