SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
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| Thematic - not seasonal. Taken May 2018 |
and ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
ORDINARY SUNDAY 5 (February 9th), 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.
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.
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